Music Formats Part 5

Digital Audio Tape - 1987

Digital Audio Tape is a signal recording and playback medium developed by Sony and introduced in 1987.In appearance it is similar to a Compact Casette, using 4 mm magnetic tape enclosed in a protective shell, but is roughly half the size at 73 mm × 54 mm × 10.5 mm. As the name suggests, the recording is digital rather than analog. DAT has the ability to record at higher, equal or lower sampling rates than a CD at 16 bits quantization. If a digital source is copied then the DAT will produce an exact clone, unlike other digital media such as Digital Compact Casette, which use a lossy data reduction system.