Tascam DA-50

Tascam's first professional DAT deck for the US market - a $4,000 machine that predates SCMS and ignores it entirely.

Overview

The DA-50 was Tascam's first professional DAT recorder marketed in the United States. Suggested retail was $4,000. The money went into the internals. There are four Zero Distortion circuits that add and subtract digital dither during conversion to knock down granulation noise, the gritty artifact that creeps in as levels drop. Tascam's own literature described the goal as reducing that noise to "virtually zero," and Studio Sound (February 1989, p.23) reported the claim alongside the deck's other headline features.

The five main internal sections are shielded in individual boxes to keep electrical interference, external vibration, and resonance away from the circuits. It is overbuilt the way professional gear often is. The machine was expected to live in a rack and work for a living.

The transport runs on four direct-drive brushless motors covering the drum, capstan, supply reel, and takeup reel. That is not a cost-saving arrangement for a DAT deck. A 38-key full-function hardwired remote is included, and metering comes from a 25-segment, three-color level meter. Recording Engineer (September 1989, p.77) noted the remote and the meter as part of the package when the deck was announced.

Collectors care about the DA-50 mostly because of SCMS. The deck was manufactured before the Serial Copy Management System was imposed, so it pays no attention to those codes. It does, however, read "copyright" codes as meaning copying is prohibited. If the source tape carries the relevant bit, the DA-50 will not enter record mode. Only original recordings bearing the "00" SCMS status code could be copied. Program numbers and start IDs were copied along with the audio.

There is a further wrinkle. The DA-50 has no AES/EBU interface, only coaxial and optical S/PDIF, so it can only be used in "consumer" mode. Recordings made via the analog inputs were written with a "00" SCMS status code. As period coverage noted, the machine in its consumer mode can make a perfect clone of all the data on a source tape despite SCMS, while its professional mode, limited by the AES/EBU standard, cannot.

Tascam later added a third sampling rate to the DA-50. In addition to the standard band rates of 32kHz and 48kHz, the deck now records at 44.1kHz, permitting two-track mastering direct to compact discs with no additional interface required. The update also brought an oversampling digital filter and a 7-way power supply system with independent transformers for the digital and analog circuitry. Recording Engineer (September 1989, p.77) covered the addition of the 44.1kHz rate, the four direct-drive motors, the remote, and the 7-way supply as a package of updates.

The DA-50 shows up in period documentation of working studios and touring rigs. A 1990s tour equipment list places one alongside a Tascam 501 CD player and a Tascam 122 cassette machine in the FOH rack. These decks served as the digital two-track at the front of house or in the mastering room.

The DA-50 is a pre-SCMS professional DAT deck with overbuilt internals, a hardwired remote, and a 44.1kHz mode that makes direct CD mastering possible. The absence of AES/EBU is a real limitation for studio integration, and the copyright-code behavior means it will refuse to record from protected sources.