Tascam DA-20
A rotating-head DAT deck that promised studio-grade mastering at a price project studios could actually stomach.
Overview
SCMS is on board. That tells you the deck was aimed at people who needed to move digital audio between machines without the copy-protection scheme getting in the way more than necessary.
The DA-20 arrived when DAT was the format studios actually used for mastering, but the machines that did it properly carried professional price tags. Tascam positioned the DA-20 as the answer to that squeeze - a deck with the features a studio needed at a price that didn't require a studio's capital budget. Sound on Sound (1995, p.97) reviewed the machine at £799 and singled out its range of practical facilities, its ability to record at 44.1kHz or 48kHz with or without SCMS, and its sound quality as the headline strengths. The same review noted one feature a studio owner might find genuinely useful: the ability to store up to 60 characters of information alongside the Start ID for each track. The reviewer's aside, that only a very sad person would painstakingly key in track titles for an entire record collection, says more about DAT's text-entry ergonomics than about the deck. The capability was real, though, and it helped anyone cataloguing a tape library.
Tascam's own advertising was blunter. The company billed the DA-20 as "the best DAT deal in the business," a studio-quality digital mastering deck with the durability, sound, and rack-mountable, studio-ready construction you'd expect from a Tascam product. That's marketing copy, not a verdict. It does show where the deck sat in the market: not the cheapest DAT machine you could buy, and not the most expensive, but one that tried to split the difference without embarrassing itself in a professional rack.
Inside, the DA-20 is a machine of its era in the most literal sense.
For anyone buying one today, the DA-20 is a competent, serviceable DAT deck from the format's mature middle period. It does two things: clean recording at 44.1 and 48kHz, and reliable playback. It's a tool, and it was priced and marketed as one.
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