Optimus DCT-2000
A RadioShack house-brand deck that played the future and the past, and got the analog half right.
Overview
The DCT-2000 is the machine Tandy built to sell the Digital Compact Cassette. It records and plays true digital audio on DCC tapes, and it plays the analog cassettes you already own. RadioShack's advertising billed it as the best of both worlds, and the copy leaned hard on the digital side: 64-times oversampling, fiber-optic and coaxial and analog inputs, and a display that could pull titles and performers' names off prerecorded DCC tapes. The ads also made a point of the deck being American craftsmanship, which is a curious boast for a format launched by Philips.
Past the brochure, this is a DCC recorder that takes the format about as far as the hardware allowed. It records and plays DCC tapes, plays back analog cassettes, and does not record in the analog format. The digital inputs - coaxial and optical - let it dub straight from a CD player's digital output, single-generation, no conversion round trip. The ID system lets you drop markers at the start of selections, erase them, renumber them, and write skip and reverse codes. A track-programming mode plays only the tracks you pick. Automatic reverse can play one side or both, and can be set to keep flipping up to eight times. There's a record-mute for editing out a false start. The deck will also play prerecorded mono DCC tapes, which reallocate the tape's data space into four segments and stretch playing time to as much as three hours.
The front panel is busy, the way that era's better decks were busy. The display at the upper left carries track number, elapsed time, remaining track time, remaining total time, and an optional numeric counter. It also shows tape type (digital or analog), direction of travel, and whether a prerecorded DCC is two-segment stereo or four-segment mono. A bar-graph stereo level indicator sits there too, which matters when you're recording through the analog inputs and a digital overload is one careless fader move away. The tape drawer is centered. Six large transport buttons handle open/close, record, pause, play, stop, and direction, while six smaller keys cover auto reverse, record muting, fast forward and rewind, and forward/reverse track search. A swing-down panel at the lower left hides the secondary controls: a three-position input selector for Analog, Digital, and Optical; a three-position Dolby NR switch (Off, B, C) for analog playback; ID write and erase keys; and the counter, display-mode, balance, and recording-level adjustments. Headphone jack and level control sit at the lower right. The rear panel carries analog in/out plus coaxial and optical digital in and out. The remote handles everything the twelve main buttons do except auto reverse and open/close, and adds display and text-mode selection.
The remote is where the ergonomics start to fray. It has no number buttons, so there's no direct track access the way CD and DAT owners were used to. Getting from track 1 to track 7 means pressing the forward Automatic Search Music System key six times, on the panel or the remote.
The bench numbers show where DCC delivered and where it didn't. HiFi-Stereo (December 1992, p.48) tested the DCT-2000 and reported single-frequency sweeps that came back ruler-flat from 20 Hz to 20 kHz - the reviewer's word - flatter than most CD players of the day. Weighted S/N measured 90.34 dBA left and 90.03 dBA right for analog-input recordings. A no-signal track recorded through the coaxial digital input played back at just over 92 dBA. Linearity on record/play via the coaxial input stayed virtually perfect below −100 dB, though playback of a Philips test tape went reasonably linear only to about −80 dB before residual noise swamped the reading. The PASC data-reduction system is lossy, and the test shows it. Fed a 700-Hz sawtooth, the even harmonics present out past 20 kHz at the input survived only to around 9 kHz on playback, and odd-order harmonics that ran beyond 20 kHz at the input stopped at roughly 17.5 kHz. The system discards what it judges inaudible or masked.
Analog cassette playback is a different story, and a better one. With calibrated BASF Type I tape, response is down about 3 dB at 18 kHz and about 2.8 dB left / 2.5 dB right at 31.5 Hz. Type II tapes measure virtually the same. Weighted S/N at a 250 nWb/m reference came in around 57 dBA with no noise reduction, 65 dBA with Dolby B, and 72 dB with Dolby C. Both systems behave as expected, B trimming high-frequency hiss by about 10 dB and C reaching further down. Wow and flutter on analog cassettes hovered around 0.1% weighted rms, with an unweighted peak near 0.2%. None of that applies to DCC playback, where the transport's mechanical wobble isn't a factor.
The DCT-2000 is a competent DCC recorder and a good analog cassette deck on the same chassis, and the analog half is the half that aged into something you can still use. The DCC half depends on tapes, and tapes are the problem. Collectors note that the format's commercial life was short and the software supply shorter, so a working DCT-2000 is a machine in search of media. The deck itself turns up. The prerecorded DCC albums with the text metadata that makes the display useful are the scarce part, and home-recorded DCC tapes are only as good as the blanks you can find.
What the DCT-2000 does well, it does without drama: clean digital dubs from a CD transport, honest metering, a display that tells you something, and analog playback that holds its own against dedicated cassette decks of the period. What it does awkwardly is track access by repeated button presses and a remote missing the one set of keys you'd want. It's a RadioShack flagship from the last gasp of the consumer tape format wars, built to sell a standard that didn't survive.
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