Hello Dat

By Janice Castro

Heralded by music lovers but feared by the music industry, the next wave of audio technology is about to hit U.S. shores. It is, as usual, made in Japan. The talk of this month's giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was digital audio tape, or DAT. It seemed that just about every electronics company was showing off DAT players and recorders, and half a dozen firms said they would be selling machines in the U.S. by the summer. That prospect alarms record-company executives, who are afraid that DAT will induce more people to record their friends' albums rather than buy them in stores.

A DAT cassette looks similar to a standard tape but is about half as large and has a much clearer, sharper sound. Like the compact disc, DAT is the product of a digital recording method that uses computer chips to break sound down into billions of bits of information, which are stored on magnetic tape. The process reproduces sound more faithfully and with less background hiss and crackling than traditional analog recording techniques.

Kenwood expects to sell the first DAT machine in the U.S. next month. It will be a combination radio and tape player for cars. Ford has announced that similar units, made by Sony, will be in some Lincoln Continentals by June. While those two machines will only play tapes, other models that record music as well have been promised for the summer by Harman/Kardon, Marantz and Casio.

At first the equipment will be too expensive to appeal to anyone but real audiophiles. The Kenwood DAT unit will cost $2,000, and the cheapest recorder announced so far will be a $1,099 model from Casio. But as happened with CD players, prices can be expected to come down sharply as the market grows and competition heats up. Almost no prerecorded tapes are available yet to play on the machines, but at the Las Vegas show three small companies announced plans to market 100 classical and jazz tapes. The dearth of prerecorded tapes and the high price of the equipment have resulted in surprisingly slow sales of DAT recorders in Japan, where they have been on the market for about a year.

The big question now is how soon Sony, which acquired CBS Records two weeks ago, will put Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson and all the other CBS stars on DAT. Sony is in an awkward position because CBS record executives have been leaders in the music industry's fight against DAT. They fear that home taping will ruin their lucrative CD business. As a modest concession to the recording industry's concerns, several DAT manufacturers are considering a special electronic system called Solo in their machines. Consumers will be able to make a digital tape of a compact disc but will not be able to duplicate that tape.

Many U.S. record executives prefer a tougher solution. They are urging Congress to force the DAT manufacturers to equip their machines with a computer chip that will block the copying of prerecorded music altogether. But while Congress considers the matter in its usual deliberate fashion, some DAT makers are accelerating their assault on the U.S. market. Their reasoning: if enough Americans buy DAT recorders, Congress will be loath to interfere with how they are used.

With reporting by Yukinori Ishikawa/Tokyo and Linda Williams/Las Vegas