Tascam DA-20 MkII
A rack-mount DAT deck that did the unglamorous work of digital recording without drama — and did it for under a grand.
Overview
The DA-20 MkII was Tascam's answer to a very specific problem: a studio or broadcast operation that wanted reliable DAT recording but couldn't justify the price of the flagship DA-30 MkII or the professional-interface DA-40. The pitch, as it appeared in dealer catalogs of the period, was blunt — "considering the jump to digital and worried about the cost? Looking for an affordable DAT option for a secondary studio?" That's the machine's whole identity in two sentences. It records and plays at 32, 44.1, and 48 kHz, and it does so while occupying three rack spaces and shipping with a wireless remote.
The connectivity tells you exactly who Tascam was aiming at. Analog in and out is unbalanced RCA only — no balanced XLR here, unlike the DA-40 sitting above it in the line. Digital I/O is S/PDIF coaxial. That's a working musician's or small-studio loadout, not a mastering room's. What it does offer is the SCMS copy-protection defeat switch, which matters enormously for anyone doing legitimate digital dubbing between decks; without it, a single first-generation digital copy is all the format would permit. Tascam made the switch available on the DA-20 MkII, and that alone made it useful in ways a consumer deck wasn't.
The feature list is where the DA-20 MkII earns its keep beyond the basics. There's a sampling monitor function, Auto ID detection level switching, and an error rate display — the last being the kind of diagnostic that separates a working tool from a black box. The long-play mode stretches recording and playback to up to four hours, which for broadcast logging or long-form capture is the difference between one tape and three. The full-function wireless remote is included rather than sold as an option, which was not a given in this price class.
Pricing is where the DA-20 MkII's story gets interesting, and a little messy. Dealer listings from the period show manufacturer's list prices ranging from $899 to $1,099 depending on the catalog and the year, with street prices quoted anywhere from $795 to $849. Collectors chasing one today should treat the lower figures as the realistic ceiling for what these actually sold for — the spread reflects changing list prices across the model's run and the usual dealer discounting, not a single fixed number. It was, by any measure, the affordable end of Tascam's DAT lineup.
Reception in the trade press was workmanlike rather than rapturous, which fits the machine. Mix (September 1998, p.45) covered the DA-30 MkII, describing it as Tascam's most popular studio DAT — a useful reminder that the DA-20 MkII was never the flagship and never pretended to be. Contemporary dealer advertising in the UK press positioned the DA20MkII squarely on price, with retailers in Sound on Sound (December 1997, p.22) running it in DAT price wars rather than reviewing it as a studio centerpiece. That's the honest read: this was a value proposition, and the press treated it as such.
What the DA-20 MkII does not have is a place in the collector conversation the way Tascam's tape machines do. DAT as a format has a devoted but narrow following, and the DA-20 MkII sits at the utilitarian end of it. The machines that command attention are the ones with balanced I/O and timecode — the DA-40, the DA-30 MkII — because those were the tools of professional work. The DA-20 MkII was the deck you bought when you needed DAT and couldn't afford the good one. That's not a knock. It's the reason so many of them were used hard, in radio stations and project studios, and it's the reason survivors today are often cosmetically rough. Buyers should expect worn transports and should verify that the tape path and heads are sound before committing; DAT mechanisms are not forgiving of neglect, and parts support for the format has thinned considerably.
The DA-20 MkII is best understood as a document of a transitional moment in recording — when DAT was the practical digital medium for people who couldn't yet afford hard-disk systems, and Tascam built a rack-mount deck to serve them at a price that made sense. It does its job, it does it at three sample rates, and it does it with a defeatable copy code and a remote in the box. For the right buyer, that's enough.
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