Sony DTC-1500ES

Follower of the DTC-1000ES, hand-assembled, sporting 4 Heads and 4 Motors, separate PTs for the D and A sections, distributed in Japan only and priced with an exclusive tag of 300,000¥ !
Compare this with the 200,000¥ of the "last-stand" DTC-2000ES, the 160,000¥ of the "regular" DTC-77ES or the mere 98,000¥ of the little DTC-55ES...


The 1500ES sold very well in Japan and was even "grey-marketed" in the US for the no-less princely sum of 2500$.
Still, "only" a post-1990 home deck so it has that bloody SCMS but at 17,5kg, it can even dwarf its DTC-2000ES follower :)

Features include time/date recording/display, margin indication, A/B repeat, a dedicated CD Direct input... but analogue !

Construction is truly impressive : all-copper, copper bus bars, generous heatsinking, a power supply section worthy of a TA-F700ES, premium caps everywhere (Duorex, Muse etc), dual a/d and quadruple d/a ICs, FET-charged outputs etc etc etc : a typical pre-bubble-burst high-end Sony product.
The d/a section is centered around a quartet of BurrBrown PCM1701P/K, two per channel, and a Sony CXD1244 digital filter ; the head drum is the DOH-11A.

Sadly, it seems most 1500ES suffer from leaky SMD caps on one of the power-supply boards which, in time, render the entire deck dead or wandering madly.
The same fate happened to the ill-fated MDP-605ES LaserDisc player or Panasonic's S-VHS bestseller NV-FS100H...

Interesting to see a typical Sony signature in the shape of the monitoring switch : same design, size and material used on many a top 3-Head Sony tape deck (whether analog or digital) since the late 70s.

Interesting, too, to see the DTC-1500ES being advertised alongwith the MX-1000ES (in its ES-X version) - the same mic/line mixer that was available along Sony's first set of 1980s ES units and specifically recommended for the TC-K777ES masterpiece... way back in 1982.

DAT was after all meant to replace the Philips Compact Cassette so this, here, is what one could call continuity.