Sony DTC-2000ES

Unveiled late in late 1993 for the '94 lineup, when the efforts to impose DAT as a consumer format were by then useless and vain to say the least - DAT had become a professional format..


This last worthwhile deck was hailed by all as the best D.A.T. recorder ever. If there were of course other obvious contenders for that Palme d'Or, but the DTC-2000ES was indeed the best (fairly) affordable consumer recorder, and that is a fact !

It also was the first consumer recording machine to have an the SBM circuit : Super Bit Mapping.
A nice touch was the presence of microphone inputs : plug in your ORTF microphone duet, hit record, (play well), and you have a MASTER tape.

Compared to the energetic sound of Sony's first DAT deck (DTC-1000ES, which I own as well - the version with dual Philips TDA1541A), the DTC-2000ES is close to being the perfect recording device - linear as can be. Thanks to its 4-head design, it remains a truly excellent stand-alone analogue-to-digital converter as well (to my ears).
Like the near-contemporary CDP-XA7ES, outputs rely on a Mos-Fet push-pull and Fets are elsewhere in the inputs.

The DTC-2000ES is a 4-head, 4 motors, direct-drive, of course with a "Metal in Gap" structure (don't ask - I don't know) which has a clear tendency to sound like it is snapping your tape to pieces - but doesn't ! I never had a tape eaten by or damaged in my 2000ES.


On the not-so-cool side, some batches seem to suffer from the same illness that killed many DTC-1500ES around the world : some SMD caps which may leak in the power-supply section and corrupt PCB traces to rapidly render the entire deck... dead for ever.

However, the proportion of the illness in the DTC-2000ES seems to be not so drastic, only making it act funny once in a while at power-on : the two displays imitate a Christmas tree and the commands are all frozen.
My own deck suffers from that and I hear it is, alas, unrepairable. However, power-off, then -on, and everything is fine.


True to itself, Sony however made two versions of the DTC-2000ES, the second of which represents an unbelievable contradiction given the nature of the destination market.

The normal version is a 4-head deck : it uses the DATM-53 mechansim, DOU-15A drum assembly and has a tape/source monitoring switch under the level display.
This drum assembly is shared by the DTC-77ES (DTC-87ES in the USA) as well as the professional PCM-2700 and PCM-R700 - all 4-head decks.

The other version is a strict 2-head version : it uses the DATM-54 mechanism and the DOU-03D drum assembly and does not have the monitoring switch. Being a 2-head, it would indeed be useless.
This drum assembly is shared with the PCM-2600, PCM-R500 and DTC-A9 - all 2-head decks.

Now for the punch-line : the 2-head version (the "G" model in the service manual) was destined to Sony's strongest market outside Japan - Germany ! Of all the countries !
More so than elsewhere in Europe, Sony always sold sizeable oodles of high-end separates and recorders and turntables and everything in Germany but chose to make one specific downsized version of a (the) high-end recorder specially and exclusively for that country.
Unbelievable stupidity, isn't it ?

However, given the success of theDTC-2000ES, Sony DE was soon forced to import from other european countries stacks of normal (4-head) DTC-2000ES to cope with the demand. Thus making German customers milk cows of sorts since they had already bought the pared-down version... and were asked to pay another time, the same amount, for the normal version !



Anyway -
Sony complemented the DTC-2000ES in late 1995 with a batch of lower end models and the lightweight DTC-ZA5ES.
The 2000ES was thereafter quickly withdrawn ; it can thus be seen as the last "classic" ES unit.

Due to a hefty 2500$ price tag back then, the DTC-2000ES isn't that easy to find nowadays but did sell very well worldwide - most of us owners hang on to ours like mad.

Beautiful image from the april 1994 japanese catalog.



This particular catalog was sadly lost by my local french post-office...
Thanks to Eiichi Muratomi who made safety scans before sending it, you can see its images, loss notwithstanding.

I am actively looking for another copy of this catalog because it is the only one which contains proper images of this beautiful recorder - all the others, in or out of Japan, are as ugly as hell.
Until I have found it, again, these low-res images are all I have that is worth posting.

All copper-plated from top to bottom.



The immense majority of the DTC-2000ES' production run was made at Sony BP : Sony Broadcast Products.
After an intermediate run at Sony Tsukuba, the last trail of the late production was done at Sony Kitakanto.
Servicing here in France (and probably elsewhere) was btw done at the Sony Broadcast center, and nowhere else.

The total production run is yet unknown but there were many DTC-2000ES made - between 10,000 and 20,000 ?

The somewhat strange choice of digital connections : three TOS optical and only one coaxial/electrical loop.


And the display even has an unused spot for a third optical input !

The effects of the SBM circuit which "uses a noise-shaping filter with a frequency response similar to that of the human ear to reduce quantizing noise within the most sensitive frequency range, and to feed back the quantizing error (that is normally lost) back to the input signal, re-integrating the low-end bit information with the high-end bit information" :

V axis is the noise level,
H axis is the sampling frequency.


See the TECH thumbnail for more details - the result makes for very clean, non-grainy, smooth recordings.

Some of my own DTC-2000ES
The DTC-2000ES seems to have been delivered much more often in its champagne version - I for one believe that unlike most ES units it looks better in black (no, I'm not saying this because I own one ;-) but, as all black components, it has to be graced with a subtle ambient light...





On the image below, you can grasp what the official images sadly never showed : the gracefully curved aluminium front plate which is what keeps the DTC-2000ES from looking like a black box with too many buttons.





Said front plate : partly extruded (lower part of the front), partly folded.





Disassembled - don't try this, it is a real nightmare ! But you can see the fully copper-plated chassis which can't be bent.
The "walls" making the "frame & beam" chassis, the bottom and back plates, the one separating the stacked horizontal boards, the doubled-up central bottom plate (all copper-plated of course)... there's only one thing moving in there : the heads! And the tape, hopefully :-)





The underside - all copper.
The recessed area holds the transformer ; the board to the the right is the underside of the analogue board with the two CXD-2562 PULSE d/a (which hold eight L/R converters each).





The bottom plate - all copper !





The digital board ; the analogue board is under this one (separated by a full-length copper-plated separation) and holding the two SBM chips.





The dual-mono CXD8493P PULSE a/d chips of the analogue board ; PULSE was developed by Sony and NTT.





One of the four Fine Ceramics feet - these weigh a lot, a lot, very much, beaucoup !
Top side shown ; the bottom side has a little felt of soft plastic which is rather very much sticky.








On the gripe side, nevertheless :

> There's no way to show the error-rate (at least I haven't found one),
> The rec/play/pause LEDs are of the too discrete kind,
> Too bad it wasn't fitted with balanced inputs/outputs,
> The margin display is a give or take 0.5dB.

> Slightly potty - the right side display has an unused FL mark for a third optical input.