Leave DAT Alone

by Carl Clegg

Digital audio has made brisk strides during the past decade. Compact disc (CD) technology, in particular, has gained a large share of the American music market. But the wave of the future may very well be digital audio tape (DAT).

DAT has a lot to offer. Already standardized, DAT recorders are sold in Japan, and on a limited basis, in Europe. The DAT cassette -- about half the size of a conventional analog cassette -- can store two hours of CD-quality music. The principal advantage of the DAT recorder over the CD player, however, is recordability. This very asset, in fact, is responsible for the current ban in the United States on DAT technology.

The impetus behind the DAT embargo is an effort to appease the prerecorded-music industry. Their chief concern is that bootlegging will cut into their profits. While their concern is legitimate, their solution is not.

The record industry is advocating laws which would coerce DAT manufacturers into equipping each DAT recorder with a copy-code chip. These chips would inhibit the recording of specially encoded CDs or, for that matter, any encoded medium, including prerecorded DAT cassettes.

Record company executives contend that DAT would be an open invitation to piracy. In reality, however, copy-code chips would violate consumers' right to make copies for their personal use, which is permitted under copyright law.

Copy-code regulations also would be unenforceable. Just as technophiles found a way around video scramblers, they would find a means to override the copy-code chip. Furthermore, the current DAT embargo has simply moved DAT sales underground. Any law, such as the copy-code law, which is widely viewed as unfair and is easily circumvented breeds disrespect for all law.

The high resolution of the CD offers the closest thing to "live" music. Critical listeners, however, who have performed comparison tests between coded and uncoded music, claim that the encoding is annoyingly obvious and seriously detracts from the quality of prerecorded music. Since all prerecorded music (and presumably, radio broadcasts, too) would be encoded, virtually everyone would suffer, not just the DAT owners.

One of the most offensive inferences of the copy-code proposal is the presumption that all potential DAT consumers are criminals. Those most offended, of course, are homerecording buffs -- those who enjoy recording not prerecorded music, but their own creations. Under the copy-code law, anyone wishing to purchase a DAT recorder would be forced to buy a copy-code chip -- an accessory he probably doesn't want and shouldn't be forced to buy.

Perhaps record company executives should take a retrospective look at the conventional analog cassette. When it first became popular, the cassette was feared by record companies as a means for copy-pirates to poach music off LPs. Today, by comparison, prerecorded tape sales -- especially with the advent of the Walkman -- exceed the sales of LPs and CDs combined. Since a prerecorded DAT tape would sound at least as good as a CD, record companies may be working against themselves by crippling a future market.

One way to deal with the problem of DAT piracy might be a stiff penalty for criminal trafficking of pirated tapes. We also should look to the free market to generate its own solutions. The personal-computer industry, for example, has done amazingly well without the "help" of anti-copying chips (which, a few years back, were thought to be essential). Software companies, in an effort to discourage unauthorized copying, reward paying customers by offering manuals, future revisions, and in many cases, telephone trouble-shooting, at little or no extra cost.

Record companies need to show more initiative. One record company, for example, has addressed the dilemma of multiple formats by offering a cassette copy with the purchase of each CD. Far-sighted companies will spend more resources on producing prerecorded DAT tapes, instead of trying to ban and devitalize DAT. Consumers would have no need to copy CDs if their favorite music were available on DAT. The best approach to progress is not to resist it, but to adopt it.