DAT was still something ...
04/08/2025
Do you remember DAT? DAT stood for Digital Audio Tape. And this roughly smaller cassette with a digital recording format was supposed to replace the compact cassette. The promise of DAT, which was standardized around the mid-1980s, was sound quality similar to that of a CD, but from a compact cassette that could be played.
The first home devices were available to buy in this country around 1987 and it was in the same year that Blaupunkt presented the prototype of a DIN standard plug-in car radio with DAT drive at the International Radio Exhibition in Berlin as the Berlin IDT 88 prototype. And you could later also buy DAT devices for cars, e.g. as the Blaupunkt DTP 08.
But probably not too many cars in this country had the pleasure of listening to music in DAT quality. Interest in the relatively expensive DAT technology (rotating "sound" head like a video recorder) disappeared with the advent of recordable CDs. DAT became a niche technology and only a few functional devices are likely to have survived in cars.
