Re: [ARSCLIST] Risk assessment tool Q3--DAT

[David Lennick <dlennick@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Don Tait wrote:

>   We at WFMT used DATs for some years for a lot of things, but problems
> developed. Given the number of people who used some of them in one way or another,
> such things as dropping them might have happened (Tom Fine mentioned the
> damage that can do). But according to our engineers there seemed to be problems of
> other types,
> including even slightly inexact winding/rewinding that damaged the signal on
> the tape. Whatever the cause, the catalyst for us to abandon the technology
> was what happened to two or three years' worth of Peter van de Graaff's programs
> for the Beethoven Satellite Network, which is produced at WFMT. All were on
> DAT. Peter found that every one of the tapes was useless. The engineers
> attributed it to imprecise winding -- it couldn't have been mishandling by Peter,
> because only he handled them and he is very fastidious. So our players might not
> have been functioning perfectly.
>
>   This is only WFMT's experience of course, and others whose DATs still play
> well have clearly had better luck. We heard that the CBC abandoned DAT at the
> time we did, because of similar trouble. David Lennick probably knows whether
> or not that's correct.

I was under the impression they stayed with DAT for quite a long time, but I'll check
with those who were actually there (I haven't worked on a CBC program since the late
90s).

dl