Sony PCM-R300
A rack-mount DAT deck that looked like a domestic cassette machine but worked like a scaled-down pro recorder, and sold for the price of a decent cassette deck.
Overview
The PCM-R300 arrived at a strange moment for DAT. By the late 1990s the format had largely been written off as a consumer medium, yet Sony kept shipping table-top machines that blurred the line between the home and the studio. Studio Sound (March 1998, p.38) opened its test by noting that just as everyone assumed DAT had died outside professional use, along came another consumer machine to prolong the death throes. Then it admitted that whether the PCM-R300 was truly aimed at the consumer market was an open question. The styling, the reviewer observed, had as much in common with Sony's domestic cassette decks as with its professional DAT machines. A closer look turned up a surprising number of features a small studio would find useful.
The deck is split down the middle. The balanced XLR analogue connections and AES-EBU of the 500 and 700 models are gone, and so are the integral rack ears that marked those down immediately as pro machines. Yet the R300 came as standard with a rack mounting kit. Its digital ins and outs on both optical and phono connectors meant that for anyone working with a digital mixer, the lack of professional analogue interfacing became irrelevant. Studio Sound (March 1998, p.38) had no serious reservations about the converters. With no published specs to go on, they simply sounded very good.
The transport appeared similar to the one in the R700, both in the way the motorised drawer pulls the tape inside and in the layout of the controls. There was a complete set of the expected functions, including full ID handling. There was also a well-planned menu arrangement, accessed from the counter mode button when no tape was moving. From there, Auto ID thresholds and gap lengths could be programmed, and you could set how the digital inputs handled incoming IDs from DAT or CD. The machine supported the broadcast version of the IEC-958 format, so material could be transferred to and from similarly equipped machines.
A second contemporary notice fills in the feature set. Sound on Sound (March 1998, p.11) reported that HHB had announced the deck as an affordable professional DAT machine at £799 including VAT, with a full selection of pro features for little more than some domestic DATs. It recorded at all three sampling rates - 32kHz, 44.1kHz and 48kHz - via analogue inputs, and carried both optical and coaxial digital I/O along with Super Bit Mapping. The same notice confirmed the infra-red remote and the absence of SCMS.
Build quality is where the R300 shows its consumer roots. Sound on Sound (April 1998, p.81) described construction around a Sony transport that combines moulded plastic components with a sturdy metal base, with the circuit boards held to the base by plastic pillar clips. The reviewer judged that about what one would expect at the price. Studio Sound (March 1998, p.38) was blunter: the construction was hardly designed with roadworthiness in mind, and the reviewer wouldn't bolt one into a rack and throw it in the back of a van. In a control room, though, that was no problem. The same test flagged a pitifully low-level headphone output. That was not unusual, the reviewer conceded, and anyway who ever uses them?
The verdict was favorable. After time with it, Studio Sound (March 1998, p.38) concluded the PCM-R300 felt like a scaled-down professional machine rather than a domestic deck trying to break into the big time. Everything needed in a basic machine was readily to hand, without clutter or unnecessary frills, at a very attractive price. It sounded good too, and the reviewer suggested it could turn out to be another example, like the DAT format itself, of something intended for the layman finding itself sought after by the specialist. Sound on Sound (April 1998, p.81) put sound quality in line with other digital devices in the same price range. It was essentially determined by the converters and the implementation of their support circuitry - power supplies and earthing - rather than by anything exotic in the box.
The R300 sits in an odd niche today. It is not the balanced, AES-equipped professional DAT that commands serious money, and it is not a featherweight consumer toy. It is a plain, rack-mountable, three-sample-rate DAT deck with Super Bit Mapping, digital I/O on both optical and coaxial connectors, and a remote. The plastic-and-metal construction and the low headphone output are real limitations. Anyone buying one should expect a working transport to matter far more than cosmetics.
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