Although DAT (Digital Audio Tape) masters have made way for solid-state storage, anyone active in music and recoding in the late 1980s through the early 2000s may have one or many DAT masters on hand. How to care for DAT masters is an important topic as the medium is not archival, meaning, DAT tapes can and do degrade over time.
Unlike analogue tapes, there is no cure for DATs that have data loss. That loss, such as drop-outs or read jitter, can not be recovered. Therefore, it is very important to move that data to a more modern media to preserve the art recorded there.
Store DATs in their cases in a cool (but not cold), dry, dark place. UV from sunlight or flourescent tubes, dust, humidity that is too high or too dry and extremes of heat and cold are all enemies of tape preservation.
Hopefully, the last time a given DAT is played, it was left ‘tails out’, meaning it wasn’t rewound. Since the winding of tape during play is more organised and tighter than when rewind, that tape pack is more secure, less subject to air and moisture infiltration, and kept flat and smooth.
We strongly suggest the transfer of the original DAT material to a solid state medium. The cost is small compared to a total loss of historical performances. We use state-of-the-art (for the time) professional DAT machines to digitally transfer DAT masters into an editing platform to separate tracks and re-output files in whatever formats are required, to be stored on flash media (thumb drive) or to a cloud destination of the client’s choice, such as DropBox or Google Drive.
If desired, the audio can be re-mastered and certain faults can be edited out.
Our rates for DAT transfer to other media are as follows:
Straight transfer single DAT to USB drive (Sandisk, PNY or other quality brands as we supply): 0-14 minutes, $60; 14-21 minutes, $95; 21-32 minutes; $125; 32-44 minutes $155. Longer lengths by quote.
Assembly of multiple DATs in sequence to a new playlist and output to USB drive, $90/h, billed in 1/2 hour increments.
Digital mastering, $125/h, billed in 1/2 increments. For instance, a 4 minute track is typically a half-hour of studio time and two 4 minute track that are versions can usually be fit into a half-hour of time. Two different tracks are typically an hour. An album’s worth of tracks is typically 3-4 hours of work. We don’t go longer in a single session for the same material because of the effects of listening fatique. Further, we will review and tweak if needed the following day on all masters, for the same reason.
Client In Attendance: By appointment, half-days only. The monitoring environment is with the engineer “driving” the session with the client providing input as desired.
Questions? Want to submit your master? Call us or contact us here.