Università degli Studi di Pavia
Centro Interdisciplinare di Bioacustica e Ricerche Ambientali
Via Taramelli 24 - 27100 Pavia - Italye-mail : cibra@cibra.unipv.it
DAT to PC connection 
Most high quality PCI sound boards now include digital I/O capabilities to transfer a recording made with a DAT to the PC digitally, without any further conversion. A digital connection allows to transfer the recorded materials to the PC and back without any further degradation related with additional - and not needed - AD and DA conversions. In this way the quality of the recording is completely preserved.
The most advanced boards have both electrical (SPDIF and AES/EBU) and optical (TosLink) I/O; some also have an ADAT interface for connecting 8 channels ADAT peripherals.
Other than on PCI boards for desktop PCs, digital I/O is also available for notebooks through many USB audio interfaces and the recently introduced FireWire audio interfaces.
Though, it is important to carefully verify the digital
I/O capabilities of the board you choose: some cheap devices don't perform
direct digital transfer of data but they do perform a real-time sampling
rate conversion (SRC) in the digital domain. This might be sometime useful,
for example to downsample to 44.1kHz a 48kHz DAT recording for CD mastering
purposes. Unfortunately, in these devices, sample rate conversion may
occur even if transferring a 48kHz DAT recording to a 48kHz sound file!!
This unnecessary data conversion introduces artifacts which corrupt the
quality of the original data. To preserve the quality of the original
data the sound boards should get the incoming sample rate to transfer
samples to the PC as they arrive, without any further processing.
Often technical documentation does not provide information about this
feature and only an accurate test can show if SRC happens or not. Look
at our tests page to learn how to
verify if SRC occurs or not.
Related Links
Core Sound - cables and accessories
Auditronics - monitoring errors on DATs
Page updated on March 17th, 2002.