My Dat machine has died again after sending away to get it fixed.The format is just not worth it.I use Dat for the FAT saturation it gives off,now I’m aware the tape is digital, It has been said the saturation coming from the machines is from The A/D converters.Can someone out there who owns one or is knowledgeable in this confirm this?the reason I am asking is the sound you get when you drive the inputs is beautiful.You can try replicate this with various soft clippers,saturators, limiters etc etc but it always falls short.in particular the harmonic distortion is always different and the way they handle top end is inferior, also the perceived loudness seems to manage greater levels with the DAT before reaching ear shredding distortion.If I can get this sound by simply clipping certain types of A/D converters that would be great.I would never bother with DAT again.Clipping the input of a soundcard would do this,no?
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Holy shit,its the converters!!!I can set it to AD/DA mode which requires no tape to pass audio through the unit.I went, tape out (from mixer), to DAT inputs and took the DAT outputs and ran it into a second mixer i have.This means i can totally bypass the tape and all the problems it brings,no need to stop and start tapes at all,just record everything into Renoise!
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Nice. Glad you found a good solution. I used dat for some years back in the 90s and aughts… Wonder if I have that machine in storage somewhere? Would be worth digging around for it to try this out
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aw, man. you deleted it just when I had a chance to give a listen. wanted to hear this!
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Cool. Thanks for another example. Please leave it up! 
Out of town for a few dayzz