Although increasingly rare these days, DAT tapes were one of the go-to formats for masters, especially for smaller studios as the tapes themselves are relatively cheap and compact yet with better-than-CD quality in many cases.

Yet many of us still have a DAT lying around from ‘the old days’, but how many of us have a DAT machine to play it on or even know someone who has one?

Our conversion service will convert your DATs to WAV format from 33p per minute, starting at £15 +VAT including free tracked return postage. We use a SONY DTC750 machine, used in many professional studios around the world and known for its quality and reliability. Your DAT is transferred using the optical digital ports for maximum fidelity to your original. The analogue output is also recorded to a separate track. This is because the optical out is the raw digital data but the analogue out has interpolation during D/A conversion. This means that any momentary digital dropouts get filled in before being output to the analogue connectors. If you find glitches in the digital version, try reviewing the analogue version at the same playback position.

How it works

Just fill out the booking form below and send us your tape, preferably using tracked postage. Include any extra info like ‘Only tracks 3, 5 and 6’ if you don’t want the whole tape converting. We’ll convert it to WAV format at the tape’s samplerate (44.1 or 48kHz, not 96kHz which is rare, the DTC750 doesn’t support it) and create a downloadable file for you. We’ll send you an invoice and a payment link for the conversion and return your tape via tracked delivery following payment. Once you’ve downloaded the WAV, our copy of the file is deleted.

Please note that if your tape is unreadable for any reason you’ll still need to cover return postage but won’t be charged otherwise. If you want particular tracks rather than the whole tape then the tape should have track IDs readable by the machine or you should provide accurate absolute time indexes.

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Name *

First

Last

Email *

This is where we’ll email you the details of where to send your tape

DAT tape title

Provide a title (optional)

Separate the tracks? *

• One file per track, zipped +£5.00
• All one file is fine

Let us know if you want the tracks separating into files. If there’s a track listing then we’ll name the files using that.

Address line 1 *

Address line 2

Town / City *

Address line the

Country *

Please note that postage to the EU is +£11.00 and postage to other countries is +£15.00

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