Sony PCM-2700A
Twenty-two pounds of copper-plated steel and four motors that let you listen to the tape you're recording. This is the professional DAT deck that mastering houses reached for when a copy had to be right the first time.
Overview
The first thing you notice is the weight. At 22 pounds the PCM-2700A sits on a shelf like it means it. Take the lid off and the reason is plain: a copper-plated steel chassis, two large fiberglass/epoxy circuit boards shielded by more metal work, and heavy-gauge metal panels doubling as heat sinks for the voltage regulators. The audio ground on the board is reinforced with copper bus bars. This deck was not built to a price point. It was built to survive a session.
All that construction buys quiet. Put an oscilloscope on the RF envelope test point and the waveform comes back stable, clean, and noise-free. That's the plated chassis, the independent supplies, and the thorough shielding at work. Two transformers isolate the digital and analog power supplies, and the high-quality sealed stereo input control is an Alps part.
The transport is the headline. Four heads and four independent motors - take-up, supply, capstan, and head drum - let the PCM-2700A read while writing, so a recording can be monitored in real time as it's made. EQ Magazine (May 1995, p.86) framed that confidence-head arrangement as the machine's core value, noting the price reflects the added cost of the extra head and the separate motors. Anyone who has made a DAT safety copy blind will see the appeal: the deck can halve the QC time on a duplication run, letting an engineer verify a tape while it's still being dubbed. The transport is also nearly silent in motion, apart from the click of the pinch roller and brake solenoids, and takes under 50 seconds to fast-wind a T-120. Tape movement is visible through the loading window, which is just as well, because there's almost no audible cue that anything is happening.
Around the back, the PCM-2700A is set up for consumer, professional, and broadcast gear. Audio inputs are balanced XLR with pin 2 hot. Digital inputs are AES/EBU on XLR and S/PDIF on coax RCA. Outputs mirror the inputs, and there's a headphone jack with its own level control. Sensitivity is adjustable from the rear panel, with a range of -12 dB to +8 dB via ultra-miniature trim pots protected under a small metal cover. An 8-pin DIN wired-parallel remote and a GPI play/pause jack on 1/4-inch TRS round out the rear panel. The DIN can be configured for stop/start from faders equipped with switches, with pins for remote tally and status lamps.
Conversion is split by direction. On the record side, a Crystal 64x-oversampling delta-sigma (1-bit) A/D does the work. On playback, an 8x-oversampling 18-bit D/A with an 18-bit interpolation digital filter and a Burr-Brown converter takes over. Frequency response is quoted at 10 Hz to 20 kHz ±0.5 dB at 44.1 kHz, with signal-to-noise better than 92 dB DIN audio weighted. Three sampling rates are available - 44.1, 48, and 32 kHz - and the two-channel level display doubles as a sample-rate indicator. Both halves light at 44.1 kHz, and only the upper or lower segments light at 48 or 32 kHz respectively.
Subcode handling is where the professional intent shows. The deck carries a built-in clock and can stamp the year, month, and day into the tape's subcode area alongside Start IDs and Program Numbers. A rehearsal mode allows precise ID placement, with the FF and RW buttons trimming the location and the amount of trim shown in the Margin Window. There's a caveat: a time-stamped tape loses part of that information if its Start IDs are later modified by a machine without the time-stamping feature, and the display will momentarily interrupt when Start IDs are recorded or repositioned by a non-timecode machine. The manual is thick and detailed, though the translation suffers a bit. Sony's own documentation warns that the fade up/down feature, with only 64 steps, will produce some zipper noise, most obvious on sine waves and pure tones rather than on actual music. Fade times run from 0.2 seconds to 15 seconds, and playback fade-in from pause and fade-out from play are both available where a fader isn't convenient.
In its May 1995 roundup of the current DAT crop, EQ Magazine (May 1995, p.86) listed the PCM-2700A and summed it up bluntly: a reliable four-motor transport, with confirmation of tape integrity while recording as a big plus. The one weakness flagged was the owner's manual's imprecise language. The reviewer concluded that for reliability at the eleventh hour, or cutting QC time in half, "there is truly no bologna in this Sony." The same review placed the deck alongside the Fostex D5, TASCAM DA-30 Mk II, Panasonic SV-4100, and HHB PDR-1000, and noted that buyers who don't need read-while-write could look at the PCM-2600 ($1795) or DTC-A8 ($1345) for four-motor reliability at lower cost.
For collectors and studio archivists today, the PCM-2700A is a machine to buy for its transport and its build, not its convenience. The copper-plated chassis and independent supplies are the kind of overengineering that ages well. The sealed Alps control and the trim-pot calibration under a metal cover suggest a deck meant to be aligned rather than replaced. The manual loses something in translation, and the fade circuitry will never be clean on a test tone. The read-while-write head is the reason to seek one out.
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