Pioneer D-9601

Pioneer's last great DAT deck doubled the sample rate when nobody was asking, and the engineers who used it never quite got over it.

Overview

The D-9601 is a stereo DAT recorder. By the mid-1990s that was not much to get excited about. DAT was a professional format, well understood and thoroughly commoditized. What set the D-9601 apart is that it recorded at 88.2 kHz and 96 kHz, double the standard sample rates. As far as the period press could tell, Pioneer was the only company offering those rates on DAT tape at all. Mix (September 1996, p.138) framed it as a machine at the absolute cutting-edge limit of technology. It also noted the flip side: limited pro-market experience and a thin dealer base in North America, which the magazine suggested spelled the end of the model.

The headline number is the frequency response: 2 Hz to 44 kHz. That only makes sense with the doubled sample rate. At 96 kHz you have the bandwidth to carry harmonics well past the audible limit. Pioneer's argument, repeated in the trade coverage of the period, was that capturing those components reproduced the harmonic structure of the original performance and gave a more transparent, dynamic, natural result. Whether that holds up is a separate question, and the reviewers who actually listened had opinions.

The deck offers three playing modes: standard, long play, and wide bandwidth. It records and plays back a table of contents with high-speed search. Start ID locations are stored at the head of the tape, so the internal computer knows where to expect each ID and search accelerates accordingly. Start IDs can be labeled with up to 60 characters, which matters a great deal to anyone cataloguing a session and not at all to anyone else. The table of contents and character-pack titling (titles, performer names, and the like) are part of the same system.

Around the back, a pair of DB-9 connectors provide an RS-422 interface supporting both Sony 9-pin and Pioneer's own "ES" bus protocols. Control is bidirectional. Sony 9-pin support implies the deck could be tied to a similarly equipped video machine or edit controller, and ES was Pioneer's scheme for controlling multiple machines. Recessed DIP switches on the rear panel set ID numbers. There's also a jack for a hard-wired remote, which was not included.

Mix (September 1996, p.138) found a full-function infrared wireless remote was standard equipment. It also observed that the identical remote from the Otari DTR-8S, also reviewed in that issue, carried an alphanumeric keypad. The Otari was made by Pioneer. The two machines are cousins, and the comparison between them runs through nearly every contemporary account of the D-9601.

The build itself earned praise for a specific reason: internal shielding extensive enough that digital noise and related artifacts were remarkably absent all the way down into the noise floor. That's not a marketing claim so much as an engineering one, and it had a practical consequence the reviewers picked up on — the effort required to build a machine capable of doubled sample-rate recording was thought to yield better-than-average sonics even at the standard rates. In other words, buy the D-9601 for 96 kHz if you like, but the 44.1 and 48 kHz performance benefited from the same chassis work.

Ergonomics are a mixed bag. The transport control logic builds in momentary pauses, which makes the machine feel slow to respond. One period reviewer's take was essentially "if this results in less mangled tapes, I'll take it." Combined with the near-silence of the mechanism, the first impression is that nothing is happening at all. Something is. The TOC is being read and the IDs are being located, just without the clatter of a consumer deck.

The one weakness the period press flagged outright was the absence of a shuttle knob. For a machine pitched at professional users and audiophiles, that's a real omission. Scrubbing tape by knob is how a lot of engineers work.

Price at introduction was $1795, which Mix (September 1996, p.138) characterized as a fair price for an unusual DAT machine that at minimum delivered some peace of mind for the digitally nervous. That framing is apt. The D-9601's pitch was partly technical and partly psychological: your masters would display superior fidelity on the advanced music and video formats then under development, and — this is the part that sold a lot of them — the deck would faithfully sample-rate convert high-sample-rate DAT recordings back down to 44.1 or 48 kHz, keeping them reassuringly compatible with CD, MiniDisc, and LaserDisc. A 96 kHz master that can't be delivered to anyone is a science project. The D-9601 could hand you both.

Doubled sample rates have a practical wrinkle, and the documentation is candid about it: twice as much storage space is required. There's a compensating plus, since more tape is used and errors are therefore less likely to be a problem.

The D-9601 also went head to head with its own cousin. In a side-by-side comparison against the Otari DTR-8S, again a Pioneer-built machine, the decks were calibrated to within 0.1 dB, recorded through an AKG SE300B with a CK91 cardioid capsule and two different preamps, and monitored on speakers and Sony V6 headphones. They sounded so similar as to be too close to call. The noise floor was identical and remarkable. The reviewer had expected to be clobbered over the head with an obvious difference and wasn't. On the bench, the higher sample rates make an obvious difference: a 10 kHz square wave sampled eight times rather than four, revealing two octaves of harmonics above the fundamental rather than none. In the listening, the gap didn't show up.

The reviewer left the result open, wondering whether the ears and peripheral gear in the test were simply incapable of resolving such microscopic details. The comparison does establish that the D-9601 is a quiet, clean, well-shielded recorder at any sample rate.

Double-speed digital copying of standard 44.1/48 kHz tapes requires two D-9601s. That's not unique to Pioneer. It's how the format works. But it does mean the deck's most useful trick is a two-machine proposition, and pairs turn up in studio inventories accordingly. One facility's gear list from the period shows exactly that: a pair of D9601s alongside TASCAM DA-60mkII and DA-302, Panasonic SV-3500 and SV-3700 machines.

The D-9601 is a professional DAT deck from the mid-1990s, and the period coverage is blunt about its commercial position: limited pro-market experience and a weak North American dealer base. Parts and service for a low-volume professional DAT machine are not a casual proposition. It was one of the few DAT decks that could claim to have pushed the format past its own ceiling, built with serious shielding and priced at $1795 when new.

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