Tascam DA-60MKII
Four heads, a built-in synchronizer and a four-figure price tag. Tascam's time-code DAT deck was a post-production tool disguised as a tape machine.
Overview
The DA-60MKII lists at $6,999 at manufacturer's suggested retail, as Tascam's own advertising had it in Mix (January 1999, p.389) and EQ (November 1998, p.25). That price tells you what this is. It was never a consumer DAT deck with a professional badge stuck on it. Tascam billed it as the "4-head Time Code Master," and the marketing was literal: a synchronizable DAT built to behave like a video tape recorder in a post-production bay.
The four-head transport gave the deck confidence monitoring. You could listen to what had just been recorded off the tape, not only to the input signal. Tascam's advertising paired the four-head design with a memory start and rehearsal function. The deck could stripe time code either before or after the audio, so a facility could lay code in whatever order its workflow needed.
Synchronization is where the DA-60MKII separated itself from the rest of the DAT field. Tascam's own literature describes a proprietary servo system that enabled jam sync time-code recording, continuous time-code recording from either an onboard or an external time-code generator, and onboard support for the Sony P2 protocol. P2 let the DA-60MKII talk to edit controllers and hard-disk systems the way a VTR would. That is why it turned up in rooms that were cutting video, not just mastering stereo.
Tascam's promotional copy notes differential power supplies for the A/D and D/A converters, and claims the arrangement delivered extremely high dynamic range and very high signal-to-noise ratios. Those are the manufacturer's own adjectives. Still, isolating the digital and analog supplies is the kind of housekeeping you find on a mastering-grade deck.
The same advertisements that listed the DA-60MKII at $6,999 also listed the DA-30MKII at $1,399 and the DA-20MKII at $969, with the 24-bit DA-45HR at $2,149. The DA-60MKII sat at the top of that family by a wide margin, priced for facilities rather than bedrooms. One distributor's catalog sheet of the period put the manufacturer's list at $6,499, so street and list pricing did not always agree, and the cost varied with the dealer doing the quoting.
In practice, the DA-60MKII was one component in a larger chain. Mix (January 2004, p.?) described a touring engineer's recording rig in which program material was routed digitally through a Finalizer and then to a pair of CD recorders, a Tascam DA-60MKII time-code DAT, and a computer running Samplitude. The DAT served as the time-code-referenced safety in a system built around synchronization.
Collectors and post-production veterans tend to group the DA-60MKII with the rest of Tascam's DAT family: the DA-30MKII, DA-20MKII, DA-45HR, DA-302, and the portable DA-P1. It is the odd one out, the only member of that group built around time code and four-head confidence monitoring rather than straight stereo mastering. It is also the scarcest on the used market by a wide margin, because far fewer were sold at its price than at the DA-30MKII's. Buyers should expect the usual DAT caveats, since transport and head wear come with any deck of this vintage. They should also verify time-code and P2 functionality specifically. Those are the features that justify the model, and a seller who only used it as a stereo recorder may never have tested them.
Similar items on eBay
No exact Tascam DA-60MKII listings are live right now — these searches show current Tascam and similar vintage audio gear on eBay:
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.