DAT (oh joy) and harnessing the power of randomness

DAT ( digital audio tape) was widely used in the professional audio recording industry in the 1990′s. Although it still has some die hard fans (especially in field recording) — it’s been dying a slow death for years. I got my first DAT recorder in 1996 — a DAT Walkman that I carried around on trips to record backgrounds, also using it as one would a camera, to record audio snapshots of random conversations and various sounds that struck me. In 1998, I bought my first Pro DAT deck because it was still a necessary evil in a well equipped sound editing room. I hated my DAT player. It was clunky with chunky buttons and you never felt like you really had control over it. Placing ID’s was a nightmare (at least for me) and just the way it spun around and clicked and clacked drove me crazy. Mike says he was always suspicious of DAT. I think we all were. But thankfully, within a few short years… DAT began being phased out and once Mike and I joined forces and to create Tree Falls in 2002, my DAT player was moved into the background. By then there were more stable ways of recording and archiving audio digitally.

Yesterday, while I was doing some paperwork at our front desk — a man walked in with a job for Clonetown. Clonetown is the other company that Mike and I own that’s dedicated to making dubs, HD transfers, clones, CDs etc. (www.clonetownHD.com) This particular client had a nearly 20 year old DAT tape containing archived blues numbers he’d performed in the 1960′s and 70′s and had remastered to DAT in the 90′s. He wanted it transfered to CD with the ultimate goal of getting about 100 CDs made. One of our dub guys, who took the order, explained that we needed to create a CD master from the DAT. From this the client’s 100 CDs would be struck. He was quoted a fee of $25 for creating a CD Dubbing Master. A reasonable sum, that is until you add in the dreaded “DAT Factor”. No one can ever really know what evil lives inside of a DAT. That is until you crack it open and play it. As it turns out our early suspicions about the stability of DAT weren’t unfounded. DAT has not proven to be a reliable digital format for audio.

Luke, our lead dub guy, started setting up the job. And since it included DAT, it peaked Mike’s attention enough to jumped in and help. Soon after… I heard wonderful blues music coming from Mike’s studio. At this point Mike had already done something called “packing” the tape. This meant doing a fast forward and rewind to acclimate the tape to the decks transports before digitizing the DAT into ProTools. Something you wouldn’t know unless you’d been around DAT in the 80′s and 90′s. The job was running smoothly until about 7 minutes into the digitizing, when both Mike and I heard a nasty bit of digital hashing (distortion). Mike wrote down the time code number and kept on recording the DAT into ProTools. By the time he got to the middle of the DAT, the digital hash was so badly interfering with one of the songs that it seemed utterly hopeless that he could ever get a clean transfer out of it. Once again he noted the time code numbers of all the distortion and kept rolling. Once he was finished recording the entire DAT into ProTools, he decided to give our second DAT player a try, to see if the DAT would be any happier in that machine. On the second pass some previously distorted areas were clean but others were now distorted but between the two passes he had most of the material — but it was in pieces. Then there were a few stubborn areas. He then forwarded to the same stubborn 7 minute mark and once again there was distortion. But what was so interesting, at least for me — was that the distortion didn’t hit in the same exact spots that it had on the previous run. It was now coming up at slightly different parts of the song. Mike then tried an old trick of doing a rapid start of the DAT just before the distorted area— in hopes of shocking the tape it into forgetting that it was having a problem. But that didn’t work either. At this point I moved to my office and Mike trudged forward.

It wasn’t until about an hour and a half later, when I saw Mike walking down the hallway, that I asked him if he’d had any success in getting that one troublesome song off of the DAT. When he told me that he’d successfully made the dubbing master and that the run of 100 CD’s was in the queue I was stunned. How had he accomplished it?

Mike went on to tell me that he’d exploited the “randomness” of the DAT’s distortion  to get all of the clean pieces he needed. Whenever he’d get to a piece of distortion, he’d stop, re-cue the DAT tape and continue recording into Pro Tools until he hit the next bit of distortion. Then he’d back up the DAT and continue on until the next bad section. There was one section that was so laden with distortion that it took nearly 50 tries to get that one piece (lasting about one second of running time) into ProTools with out distortion. In keeping at this task of letting the DAT decide where to randomly distort or not, he was finally able to cull all the necessary clean pieces to  begin the painstaking process of editing the song back together.

Mike went on to say that he’d also filtered the songs to reduce the “snap, crackle and pop”(many of the songs originated from vinyl) and he that he had done far more editing than he’d imagined he’d have to do to piece the song back together. True tenacity. Plus two DAT players, one ProTools rig, lots of sourcing and editing, filtering and still more editing until finally Mike had a complete CD Dubbing Master with every single note intact.

I do think that most of the larger (and even smaller dubbing companies for that matter) would not have gone to such lengths to get every last bit of audio off of this DAT. I think most would have early on admitted defeat, calling the client to inform them that the DAT had a large section that was un-fixable. In the end, this $25 dubbing master was more of an archival restoration job worth at least $500, but we never considered asking the client for more money. It was ultimately our decision to do all that we could do.

Mike later told me that he saw this job as a challenge. A puzzle. And a way to use his experience with older technology gained in the 80′s and 90′s to meet the goal. Often it’s not so much about the bottom line as it’s about the satisfaction gained in knowing that we’ve utilized all of our experience to make a client happy. Plus… being owner operators helps too. We just do what needs to be done and we empower our employees to do the same. No need to ask for permission. Just get the job it done right. A lot of times it goes unnoticed because we don’t make a big point of calling attention to it. But it feels right to me and Mike. We really don’t know any other way to run our businesses.

We hope our new client uses his CD to jump start his career. And we’re quite happy to report that every last note of every last song will be on his CD.

Tree Falls Post is a full service audio and video post facility. Visit Tree Falls at: www.tfpost.com

Clonetown is a high definition dubbing and transfer facility. Visit Clonetown at: www.clonetownHD.com

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