> ... VHS players rapidly became throw-away items – eventually nobody really cared if they only lasted a year or two.
I don't know if I'm losing my marbles, but I don't ever recall a time growing up when my family (or anyone else I knew) were buying a new VCR every year or two.
Early 2000s. My family used VHS until after the switch to digital TV. Not that we would buy one new, but if we found one at a garage sale for a couple bucks we would take it. Used to have a stock of 2 or 3 on hand at a time. They were all late 90's / early 2000s models that everyone was dropping in favor of DVDs, made as cheap as possible, and would quit working in about 8-10 months. Which meant I got to take apart the broken one - I recall taking apart around a dozen, but some of those were already broken and found in the trash.
Meanwhile, the "basement" VCR my dad bought new in '85 still works to this day, but that one was less programmable, so we always used the cheap ones to record off the air.
The previous owners of my apartment left a VCR behind. I think it's from the mid-90s, but I'm not sure. It didn't work very reliably, taking time to turn on and sometimes shutting off when e.g. spinning up the video head. But my hands were itching to fix something, so, after all these years of putting it off, I replaced the capacitors in the power supply section, and now it works about 98% of the time. The remaining 2% is the mechanism sometimes locking up when switching between playing and rewinding. Still proud of myself, heh.
My own impressions after taking it completely apart (you have to, to get the main board out) and putting it back together, is that the engineers who made it definitely did so with repairability in mind (the service manual is very detailed and way above my level of understanding of electronics), but it was also made to a price point. A high one admittedly, but it's still not nearly "no expense spared" level of robustness.
I vividly remember the day when at age 10 my grandfather let me disassemble a broken VCR. It is the day I learned to treat electronics with large capacitors with respect.
All of our VCRs lasted a very long time. My parents had a Toshiba VCR from the late 1980s as well as a Sony Hi-Fi model VCR from 1995, both of which lasted for years and years, even in spite of damage and neglect from use (and misuse) by young children.
That is unfortunately my experience. My household between ~2005 and ~2015 acquired a VCR every year or so, keeping pace with the rate at which they would pack up. These were second-hand machines at the end of their life, so although I wouldn't say we "didn't care" when disposing of them, it was with a sense of resignation as we knew that repairing them was beyond our collective skill and equipment.
At an ambient relative humidity of 90%, the tapes themselves would become mouldy at an alarming rate. We did therefore check for mould before playing them, as this could have rubbed off onto the VCRs and then might have spread to other tapes.
My father recorded the news every night so he could watch it when he got home from work, so we had a VCR pretty close to the end of NTSC broadcasting.
I can recall at one point the last generation of rubbish units-- I think they were all basically the same basic Funai model with different badges by then Funai-- I had to open the lid and bend back some metal piece that was preventing operation, because they were so flimsy.
Today I think of VHS as ideal for people who want to get into an obsolete format. I often see decks for sale for $12 that work great at our reuse center and prerecorded tapes with great moves up to 2005 or so are $1-2 there or the Salvation Army. The decks I see are late models which have automatic tracking and VHS HiFi and are highly reliable -- commercial movies are usually encoded in Dolby Pro Logic and often sound more cinematic than many DVDs because the average DVD has a NERFed 5.1 track because they assume you're going to play it on a two-channel system.
Obsolete formats (especially with high performance mechanics) are fun, but VHS picture quality isn't. My idea of fun would be to try to get the best picture quality possible by throwing appropriate digital encoding + error correction + compression at the problem - the more anachronistic, the better.
We have crazy powerful DSPs (like a low end GPU), advances in coding and error correction codes, and highly advanced lossy compression algorithms now 8)
Previously on HN: film on vinyl LP (pretty terrible, not much to work with), super high quality VHS reading by hooking up ADCs directly to the video heads + software, and VHS tape streamers (IIRC 1-2 GB with circa 1993 cheap hardware).
why not DVD, wtih hardware & movies that are just as cheap and better in almost every way?
I think this is plausible as we got into the late 90s and they became cheap enough to not warrant repairs. Prior to that, though, it definitely was not the case. I had a neighbor who made quite a comfortable living repairing VCRs in the 80s and early 90s. I also saw the web for the first time in his shop in 93/94.
In the range of 1984-1992 ISTR my family went through around 4 VCRs, ISTR a Sharp, a Toshiba, and a couple of Sonys. I was particularly annoyed with one of the Sony failures because it was a fairly high end unit and it died with a particularly hard to find extended cut of Dune in it.
I’m you were a heavy user it wasn’t uncommon. I bought one in 2000 for $30. The thing had to be garbage at that price point.
I don't think that happened until Apex released sub-$50 DVD players where they were being placed in kid's rooms and people didn't mind if a PB&J was inserted into it. Then it was just another toy the kid broke to go along with the 10 copies of the same DVD that kept getting so scratched up that it couldn't play any more. As long as dad's player/TV were kept clean, the kid's DVD player could be replace at will.
Even VHS tapes were much more expensive than DVDs right up until DVDs.
Yeah, my family didn't even have one and I wasn't too sad about it, but what I remember from people who had them is that - whether it was an early expensive one or a late cheap one - they lasted long, like 5 to 10+ years.
It's all survivorship bias. Of course the top-of-the-line built-like-a-tank tech from 50 years ago still works. It doesn't mean the good enough tech from 50 years ago didn't last 20+ years
Same. It's either that the author had quiet a different life than us or they wrote it using an LLM
My grandparents had the same 3 VHS units in their house until they moved to digital tv.
We only ever replaced ours once.
A mate of mine had 4 in a stack for the purpose of duplicating and distributing VHS tapes illegally. I think 1 of them stopped working.
Another mate had one that wouldnt rewind faster than playback speed. But they just returned the tapes in dickhead mode rather than paying for a new VCR.
Yeah, any VCR purchased in the early 90s was still doing just fine when the late 90s and DVD players rolled around.
But I’ve never heard of a “VHS player” —- always a VCR or a VTP for a playback only unit as uncommon as they were.
DATs are partly responsible for the huge resurgence in the sale of brand new/unreleased "old school" dance music.
There's a vinyl record label called Deep Jungle [0] which specialises in sourcing unreleased (or very limited pressings originally) 90s jungle/drum&bass straight from the artists - for a fair price.
Each release has a backstory often involving getting boxes of DATs down from the attic! The music is remastered with modern technology.
Demand is high (literally selling out within minutes!) as the label covers both older customers (who went raving in the 90s) and the younger generation exploring older music.
Yeah DAT was big in electronic music.
Everyone in DnB documentaries talks about going to Music House with DATs to get dubplates cut to play in the clubs later on that evening.
This would have been before CD-Rs were commonplace, early 90s.
I believe DAT was also very popular in the 90s "taper" scene. I know someone who used to record Phish shows and I believe that's the format they used.
Personally I'm more of a fan of minidisc. You can get minidisc players for $100 or so on Ebay and they occasionally show up at the local reuse center for less than that and my experience is that 100% of the minidisc players I've picked up worked (had one fail in six months though...), in contrast to about a 40% success rate with cassette decks. You can buy minidiscs in bulk from Japan for about $1.50 each, which is cheaper than Type 2 tapes. Portable minidisc players are available and can be plugged into your computer via USB to record music with names for the tracks.
My reuse center got two DAT decks, one of which looked terribly trashed, for $200 a piece. Nein Danke!
There's an active community around MiniDisc these days. r/minidisc and Discord are the places to check. People have been building replacement gumstick Li ion batteries with reasonable quality and there are replacement OLED displays for RH1 and RH10 Sony players. Mechanisms will eventually fail, I suppose, but for now you can still enjoy the format.
On the software end, web.minidisc.wiki has come a long way and there are even projects to expand the functionality of player firmware. Cool hobby, if you're into that.
My son wanted to make a friend of his a mix tape, so I just recently went through the process of trying to get him a tape deck he could record to. Older decks on ebay are dicey, I got one labeled as "tested and working", but it arrived and was definitely not. "LOL, I just copied and pasted another listing, didn't read it". I got this weird deck that looks like the old portable decks from the '80s, but it can record to and from a USB, and once he figured out the right levels and compression settings (audio, not digital), he was able to make a reasonable sounding cassette. We had a lot of discussions about S/N ratios and bandwidth that I never expected to have with him.
Minidisc was where the fun was, it sounded good and the Walkmen were small. I loved that you could edit the md. Which meant if you recorded off the radio, you could instantly have your favorite song on repeat (with DJs talking over the song of course, but it beat waiting weeks before something would be available) - never got a DAT deck because MD was so much more convenient. And then MP3 players came - those with Rockbox were peak fun.
MD pricing can definitely be hit-or-miss, especially on those desirable USB NetMD units. But enough were sold that a little patience all but guarantees you'll find something satisfactory.
Clear miss, could have titled it "they don't make'em like dat anymore".
In the 90s I used to DJ Goa trance off DAT tapes. It was just a thing that was done in that genre. Later on I started producing music and all the masters were recorded into DATs (usually live playing full midi orchestration). A couple month ago I sent my old Sony TCD7 DAT recorder to be fixed. It was in storage for so long that the inner moving parts were stuck solid. Yesterday I discovered that in 2025 SPDIF to USB is a thing, so as I'm writing this, my DAT player is connected to my PC recording all the music I had on DATs into FLAC files. DAT was indeed (and still is) a wonderful medium.
Fun fact: Similar to DAT, digital audio also had the option of being stored as video signals on VHS tapes. It is also the origin of the awkward 44100 Hz sample rate, compared to the cleaner 48000 Hz with smaller prime factors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS#Hi-Fi_audio_system , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCM_adaptor , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44,100_Hz
Though that does lead to the question "why not something more like 49152 if that mattered so much?".
> But I doubt that DAT units could ever have become as cheap as cassette players, and certainly not as portable, because the electromechanical design was so complex and fussy.
In fact they were portable. Cheap, certainly not.
Sold my beloved Sony TCD-D100 some years ago, as it was just sitting around. Beautiful device.
Also check out the TCD-D10. Truly a gem of 80s design.
SGI branded DAT drives would copy and play anything. Just FYI for anyone using IRIX. The machines were generally great for audio.
DAT was popular in the jam-band-taping community around the time this device was released. Folks would go to shows, and either record the show with their own mics and tape deck, or by plugging a line directly into the soundboard and then taping. I think back in the 70s, people used reel-to-reel tapes, and many tapers upgraded to DAT (IIUC, not very many used regular analog cassettes). Tape copies were distributed in a tree fashion and each generation was degraded compared to the original.
I wasn't able to do DAT because of the extremely high prices. So I mainly ended up with copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy analog cassette, which usually sounded terrible (lots of tape hiss and distortion).
Analog cassettes had their own issues: dual tape decks made very poor copies (I think this was some sort of copy protection feature) although you could use two decks. I was really glad to see analog go- these days, nearly eveyrthing is digitally recorded, with all the conveniences of digital, and many old reel to reel tapes and DATs have been captured with high quality devices.
It's also kind of funny that I lived through the entire CD era- from the first obscenely expensive CD readers to an age when everybody could buy a cheap blu-ray recorder to CDs being obsolete.
Some soundboards had a tape recorder built-in, so you could give the guy running the mix a blank tape to hit record when you started playing.
I remember the DAT as a format killed by IP lawyers. The were many lawsuits seeking to prevent their sale in the US due to piracy concerns. The media was incredibly expensive. I only ever saw them in use for backup devices in small data centers. Even that went away once disks became cheaper.
The whole "Home taping is killing music" was really "Industry sharks are killing music" in the era that DAT died anyway.
It did have a Streisand effect though.
It's use case was limited to people who needed to make digital recordings. For consumption, CDs are far more convenient.
As the article mentions, DAT was mandated to be deliberately limited in its use by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act -- the first MP3 players were sued under the definition in the law, and barely escaped being banned. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_Industry_Ass%27n_of_.... )
The lesson learned by from this in the tech policy space in the 2000s was that legal tech mandates like this were really the worst form of regulation -- they both limited innovation, and didn't really work for the kind of market/business model protection that their advocates desired. I think we'll probably re-learn this after a long period of lax (or relaxed, depending on how you view it) regulation of tech.
For all its notional advantages, DAT never really caught on in the domestic market, although it was somewhat more popular in professional applications.
It was positioned and priced as a professional device.
In 1990 you could get a decent portable CD player for about $100. That was enough for most consumers.
Plus with a cd you could skip directly from track to track. No messing around with fast forward and rewind to find a song. Unless maybe DAT had that functionality? I never used it.
They had a bit of a second life in recording studios. My friends' band (signed to a Sony sub-label) still has DAT masters of their records, and that would have been from the end of the 1990s.
DAT entered the market at about the same time as CD, but was much less successful. For all its notional advantages, DAT never really caught on in the domestic market
Audio distribution dominates the consumer market and CD’s can be pressed much like a vinyl record. Basically, producing a full fledged CD takes about the same effort as manufacturing half the cassette case for DAT.
A CD is a mechanically stamped plastic widget. A DAT tape requires a BOM and assembly before loading it with data.
The CD stampers were expensive to fabricate.
I loved dat. I actually had that particular deck, but i had rack rails for it as well. sold it and replaced it with a Panasonic sv-3800, which I still have but it's seen better days and needs a cleaning/alignment badly.
amusingly, I won a contest for widmer brewing in the 90's when they were looking for interesting toasts to put as phrases under their bottle caps: "To Disc and DAT".
unfortunately, I have a bunch of masters and backups of a digital 4-track on dat, and am unable to access them due to the unhappy deck.
I still have a stack of DATs from when I had a portable recorder. I'd record DJ sets when friends were playing parties. Unfortunately, I no longer have a DAT player. DAT was the first tape format that was actually listenable for me. Cassette hiss was annoying, but there was nothing else so we all listened to hiss forever. Having a tape that was that free of hiss was amazing.
There was a time period where DJs were passing around DATs of unreleased tracks, and some DJs would try to play sets from them. They had the advantage of not being destroyed by the sand on the beach, but had the distinct disadvantage of no pitch control for proper beat matching. I did have access to two studio rack mounted DAT machines that did have pitch control, but they were top of the line very expensive units which is why no DJ was ever going to have them.
I spent many hundreds and maybe thousands of hours using Sony PCM7000 and 7010 Pro DAT recorders and those things were just a sheer joy to use. They were so perfect in basically ever single way.
Huge opportunity missed to not title this "They don't make em like DAT anymore.."
I still have one of these that I bought back in its heyday, but it doesn't work. I suspect it just needs new belts.
We used them for years in broadcast radio outside broadcast (I.e live concert) recordings, first as source, then as backup for unreliable computers. Not anymore, but they had a pretty long run into the 2000s in parts of the pro world.
Where I worked had mostly moved to sound devices and such for high quality 2 track recordings. Portable Sadie or pro tools for multitracks.
"In the the late 80s it wasn’t easy to copy a CD onto DAT, because of the different sampling rates."
At that point nobody worried about using the analog inputs to do the copy. The quality was such a leap from cassette that nobody would quibble about an analog stage. I know because I was one such consumer. I had the Sony TCD-D8 portable.
As usual, the record companies' and Congress's behavior in the DAT case screwed the American public. The lie of "perfect digital copies causing piracy" was gobbled up by a legislature of out-of-touch geezers eager to serve corporate interests, when everyone with a brain knew that all "piracy" was taking place on double-cassette boom boxes in dorm rooms. Statistically nobody copying music gave a shit about quality.
And sure enough, when MP3 came along it further proved the point by being a glaringly IMperfect digital copy. So all the audiophiles, home musicians, and indie bands who would have built the market for DAT got screwed by media conglomerates' lies and Congress for no reason.
And oh yeah, that asinine tax on blank media: I would have then made the argument that by paying it, I paid for a license to copy whatever I wanted.
Anyone old enough might remember that Best Buy and Circuit City advertised "any CD $10.99 or less" at a time when they were typically $16. Then, all of a sudden, that deal disappeared... to the point that employees even feigned ignorance. Why?
It turns out that record companies had colluded and strong-armed retailers into rescinding this pricing. They were later found to have illegally ripped consumers off for $400 million (if I remember correctly), which coincidentally was the exact amount they were whining that Napster cost them. I still have a copy of the $13 settlement check I received from this cartel. But you didn't hear that side of the story much, did you? All you've heard for decades has been the caterwauling about "piracy," but never crimes perpetrated by record companies. <cough>SonyRootKit</cough>
DAT's fate stands testament to the relentless ripping-off of the American consumer, under the cover of absurd lies abetted by corporate stooges masquerading as "our" representatives.
My older brother had all the top of the line Sony gear from the 80s (the ES line) along with some Bose AM-5 speakers. Boy, that rig rocked.
I loved my Dat decks... TCD-D7 and a D8... graduated to an Alesis ADAT and then lost interest in the recording/mixing hobby
I used to have a DTC-690 - brilliant for parties. Sold it for £1 in the end to a happy customer.
I still remember listening on headphones to the recording of our jazz ensemble in high school, when they got a DAT system. It was a "holy shit" moment and I always wonder (>30 years later) if it would still be a holy shit moment today.
Now find the anime in which the wider frequency range of DAT player was a key plot point.