Digital Audio Tape (DAT or R-DAT) is a signal recording and playback medium developed by Sony and introduced in 1987.
Digital Audio Tape (DAT) employs a rotating head and helical scan, a technique borrowed from video recorders, to record digital audio on 3.81mm magnetic tape housed in a protective shell. DAT supports sampling rates of 44.1, 48, or 32 kHz at 16-bit quantization, allowing for exact digital clones. Unlike some other digital formats, it doesn’t use lossy data reduction. The tape can only be recorded and played in one direction, similar to a videocassette.
Fun Fact:
Because DAT technology is based on video recorders, some early DAT machines could be “hacked” to record low-resolution video! It wasn’t officially supported, but clever users figured out ways to exploit the underlying technology.