And who remembers the very short lived DCC that Philips launched in 92. DCC lasted only 4 years!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette
Luxury.
When I was a lad, all we had to listen to music on was wax cylinders.
DAT was great. Currently, I am re-archiving Kevin Gilbert's recorded material. There are a hundred or so DATs. Unfortunately, some are non-functioning or there are some tape glitches that have occurred. Some of these DATs are 20+ years old. I've also had to repair broken DAT casings where the hinge or flap was broken.
Here is the PE minidisc thread:
Minidisc!
Accidentally erasing or recording over something on mini disc is very much possible.
To my recollection mini disc sounded like mp3. But it was practical.
DAT had no frequency limitation like the CD and was used as the master source in many cases.
You can argue that you cant hear frequencies over 20 khz (well in most cases here, probably more likely 10 khz), but ripples above can create sounds below, and thus contribute to the soundpicture.
Minidisc used ATRAC, a proprietary lossy compression scheme that was in may ways similar to (but seems to have sounded somewhat better than) MP3. And it had a data transfer rate of just under 300kbs which is decent. And DAT recording was pretty much identical to CD, except most machines could be bumped from a sampling rate of 44.1Khz to 48. DAT was only useful for the fact that it was, well, a real time recordable medium in the days before CDR but other than that it had all the potential mechanical screw-ups of cassette. More maybe because the whole mechanism that pulled the tape from the housing to go around the rotating heads could jam up and eat your tape with it, just like a VCR.
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