Teac R-1

Near second generation DAT recorder of the superlative kind. Also the enormous kind. Also the impressive kind. Also... the near-Invisibila kind !

Unlike Teac's later digital recorders, the R-1 is a strictly audiophile deck : if XLR balanced terminals are present, there is no TTL sync, RS-232 or RS-442 control plugs. To make up for this, Teac built the R-1 very much like its contemporary CD players, the P-1 and D-1 : lavishly. And it was named ESOTERIC in Japan, too.

Teac also made a TASCAM version of the R-1 which is moslty identical bar the name and the absence of the 5mm thick front lid hiding the commands ; the two transformers are both tagged 'ESOTERIC' on both versions.

The Teac R-1 uses Burr Brown PCM-77P d/a and BB PCM-53JP-V for a/d.
The Tascam version has BB PCM-64P d/a and BB PCM-78P as a/d.
The a/d boards on both are nearly identical (bar the converters) but the d/a board of the Teac version is more populated with post-d/a caps.

Thick 5mm aluminium slabs everywhere, anti-resonant feet for the enclosure, two separate sub-blocks that respectively hold the analogue and digital sections, Teac's staple ZD digital-to-analogue and analogue-to-digital ICs, ultra-linear and phase linear 16-bit circuitry, 7th order Bessel low-pass filter and very beefy power supply with seven regulated feeds.

The motor is a four-heads 4DD and it came from Sony.
Teac's real biz' was open-reel so TEAC didn't develop its own DAT mechanism (like Pioneer who used Sony's DTC-1000ES drive for its 1987 D-1000) : not for its first deck, the R-1, which used a Sony DTC-1000ES drive with custom loading system (possibly from ALPS : Alpine had after all served Teac with many a cassette drive throughout the late 1970s and 1980s), nor for any of its later decks, whether in Teac or Tascam guises.

Missing from the R-1 was the ability to record incoming digital signals sampled at 44.1Khz - just as any other 1st generation DAT.
Modding was probably possible (like for the Sony bestseller) but given the low, very low production run of the R-1, probably very few really contemplated the possibility.

Digital recording at 48Khz was possible, of course, if no "copy prohibit" flag was present in the bit stream. 32Khz is ok but... who ever used that ?

The functions are all that was available elsewhere in 1988 :
even ABS (Absolute) time seems to have been implemented, although, from all catalog images, even very late ones from 1990, only the good old "counter" mode seems present...
And, mostly, the presence of a "blank search" function tends to prove this absence as blank spaces prevent proper ABS time to be recorded.

Also cute : there's a photo-electric sensor hidden just before the tape's opening. Whenever one approaches a tape, the sensor triggers the opening - very much like a guillotine :)

Useful features for the semi-pro (or the obsessive) : block-repeat, an equivalent to A-B repeat on CD players, display brightness switch, selectable peak-hold time, and a magnificently oversized remote-control made of profiled aluminium !
DAT was luxury, then.