Costa Mesa’s Archive Corp. Banks on Consumer Surge to Digital Audio Tape : SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY
While audio buffs eagerly await the arrival of digital audio tape recorders in the United States, a Costa Mesa high-technology firm is preparing to bring DAT technology to the computer world.
Archive Corp. has signed a licensing agreement with Sony and Hewlett-Packard, allowing it to use DAT technology in developing computer tape drives. Archive said it is the first major tape drive manufacturer to adopt Sony and Hewlett-Packard’s DAT format known as Digital Data Storage.
DAT technology can be used for high-density storage of information on a narrow tape. DAT tape drives would be slightly smaller than a credit card. They would be both less expensive and capable of storing many times more information than traditional magnetic tape devices, said Rick A. Peters, Archive’s marketing director.
“This has the potential of being a very high-volume product for us,” Peters said. “It’s got a huge potential if digital audio tape takes off for the consumer market.”
The success of DAT recorders is crucial to the success of DAT products for the computer industry. If DAT recorders are a hit with consumers, manufacturers could lower production costs and produce DAT products for computer applications at less cost.
DAT recorders, which offer digitally recorded music and exceptional sound quality, are considered a potential replacement for compact disc players. A drawback of CD players is that they can play only pre-recorded music, while DAT recorders can make recordings on blank tapes.
DAT recorders are widely available in Japan, but their entry into the U.S. market has been delayed because of pressure from the U.S. recording industry. Record companies fear that DAT recorders will pinch sales by allowing consumers to make high-quality recordings from CDs.
Archive hopes to have a DAT tape drive on the market within a year, Peters said. If the company is successful, DAT products should be a “substantial” part of Archive’s sales within two or three years, he said.
The Costa Mesa company’s choice of the Digital Data Storage format is risky. The format, which determines how data is organized on a tape, is one of several DAT technologies that are being developed for data storage. So there is no guarantee that the DDS format will become the industry standard.
The situation is somewhat similar to the one involving the Beta and VHS formats used in video cassette recorders. The VHS format was widely adopted by VCR manufacturers, while the competing Beta format developed by Sony never caught on.
“We feel we selected the one that will be the VHS,” Peters said.
The DAT technology also faces competition from alternative technologies such as optical storage discs, which are being developed by Tandy Corp. and other companies.
