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From consumer to professional and back again, DAT's role remains undefined. Dave Foister test drives Sony's latest recorder
JUST AS WE START to believe that DAT has finally died as anything other than a professional medium, along comes another consumer machine to prolong the death throes for a while. Sometimes it's a little portable, producing another crop of amateur recordings for us to salvage; less often, it's a full-blown table-top model, which immediately has us asking if it's suitable for studio use. Whether Sony's new PCM-R300 is truly aimed at the consumer market I'm not sure, although its styling has as much in common with Sony's domestic cassette decks as with its professional DAT machines; its facilities too look at first glance as though it's meant for home use, but a closer look reveals a surprising number of features the small studio would find useful.
Despite its similar model number, this new machine doesn't appear to be intimately related to the 500 and 700 models (Studio Sound, July 1997). Gone are the balanced XLR analogue connections and AES-EBU, and the integral rack ears which marked those down immediately as pro machines. Yet the 300 comes as standard with a rack mounting kit; and with digital ins and outs on both optical and phono connectors, the lack of professional analogue...