Fostex 10-DAT
A rack-space DAT deck that broadcasters bought by the pair — and locked together for sample-accurate splices.
Overview
The 10-DAT is a machine that makes its priorities obvious the moment you look at the front panel. The transport buttons sit beneath the cassette tray, big backlit keys that EQ Magazine (February 1994, p.86) compared to the controls on Fostex's own D-20 or to Sony BVU-style video machines — a deliberate choice for people working in dim production rooms who need to hit PLAY without hunting. Press PLAY, STOP, or just nudge the tray's front edge and it closes; if there's a tape inside, the deck drops straight into pause so playback is essentially instant.
That instant-start behavior is the whole point. A RAM buffer holds roughly 1MB of audio for cueing and scrub work, and the deck's "Instant Start" is built on it. The jog/shuttle wheel lets an operator hear the tape moving forward and backward — audible from half-speed up to five times normal, with the transport itself capable of scrubbing from 1/2 to 16x normal. To use the RAM scrub function the tape has to be striped with A-Time or R-Time; a deck that can write those codes when the original recording was made solves it, but that deck won't always be sitting there. It's a real-world limitation, not a paper one.
The location and cueing section is where the 10-DAT earns its keep in a production room. A ten-key pad stores and recalls as many as 100 cue points. Program numbers — up to 799 of them — can be written automatically or manually, renumbered, and skipped in playback. A blank-search function hunts down the next unrecorded stretch of tape, and auto-rehearse lets an editor preview a punch before committing it. Auto record puts hands-free punch-ins under microprocessor control, and repeated punch-ins stay accurate. Search speed runs up to 250 times normal, which Studio Sound (March 1994, p.8) flagged as the kind of figure that matters when you're flying through a long tape to find one cut.
The connectivity is squarely professional. Analog I/O arrives on balanced XLR and unbalanced RCA; digital connections run AES/EBU and IEC optical. The deck records and plays at 48 and 44.1kHz, reads and displays A-Time or Pro-R time, and occupies three rack spaces. A wireless remote is included. SCMS copy guard is not incorporated, so second-generation digital copies can be made from any digital source — a detail that mattered enormously to engineers dubbing between machines. Universal GPI ports on the back let a pair of 10-DATs be locked together for assembly editing, with the two decks handing control back and forth for sample-accurate splices. Studio Sound (June 1994, p.31) described the two-machine workflow in exactly those terms: cut, splice, listen, repeat, with no waiting between passes.
What the 10-DAT does not provide, according to the period field report in Radio magazine (May 1994), is off-tape monitoring, serial control, or time-code operation out of the box — though Fostex had announced an optional SMPTE generator/reader and serial-control upgrade. The same report noted a couple of ergonomic gripes: a delayed power muting function would have been welcome to kill the audible pop through speakers or headphones at power-up, and a switch to attenuate the analog outputs from +4dBu down to 0dBu, −3dBu, or −6dBu would have helped in different monitoring situations. These are the kinds of flaws that don't show up in a brochure and do show up every day in a studio.
Pricing put it in the middle of the professional field. Radio magazine's field report (May 1994) called the roughly $3,000 asking price mid-priced by radio-station standards and judged the machine cost-effective and durable within that class. Distributor listings of the era show an MFR list of $3,295.00, with street quotations available on request — the usual dance. For a broadcaster or post house that needed a versatile DAT machine for sequencing and sample work, that math was easy to do.
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