Pioneer D-9601

Later version of the original (consumer) D-07, the D-9601 was Pioneer's professional Hi-Sampling deck.

Hi-Sampling means sampling at 96Khz - twice the DAT specification.
There was no super-duper circuit or sci-fi algorithm behind this feat : the tape itself travels at twice the speed (16,3mm/s) while the drum rotates at 4000rpm instead of 2000rpm :-)
Finally not much different thn a Technics RS-1800 spinning tape at 76cm/s instead of 38cm/s.

Since the D-9601 is a professional deck, it sports typically professional features : XLR and AES/EBU i/os, Copy ID selector and RS-422and parallel connectors, plus a convenient one-button head A/B error-check.

The 9601 also had something which was written in DAT's White papers but oh so rarely implemented except by Casio (DA-1) and many upper-end Pioneer units : TOC or Table of Contents.
That nifty feature allowed to write a TOC at the beginning of the tape for trouble-free retrieval of the content recorded : up to fifty alphanumerical characters. A little fastidious to use but sometimes quite useful.

Sound-wise, the 96Khz sampling did make a difference indeed but a fairly trivial problem still was standing tall : 96Khz tapes were only compatible with a 96Khz players - and Pioneer was far from being the studio heavyweight Sony and Panasonic were...

As a result, despite its qualities, Hi-Sampling DAT remained discrete throughout its short career.


A 1996 review here.