The Alesis ADAT was groundbreaking when it first hit the market, giving affordable digital recording, but even those of us who owned them had a love/hate relationship with them, here’s why.
A Brief History Of ADAT
In a world where you can record almost infinite tracks, at fantastic quality, on a laptop, using a DAW, that costs very little money, it’s easy to underestimate the impact the ADAT had on the recording world when it came to market in 1992.
Up until that point, to record in a digital multitrack format meant the cost of a small house. Two manufacturers owned most of the digital studio space. Sony with their 24 track PCM-3324 DASH format recorder, which was later joined in 1989 by the Sony PCM-3348, offering 48 tracks. Mitsubishi offered a 32 track format in the form of the X850 and later on the X880. As already stated, these were not cheap, with the Sony 3324 costing around US$150,000 and the Sony 3348HR costing around US$250,000. The X-850 was about $150,000. Remember this was in the 80s! These were big machines, about the size of a chest freezer, so the home studio owner was unlikely to be able to afford, or house one of these machines.
Then in early 1992, Alesis shipped the first ADAT machine. Here are the specifications:
Recording format: ADAT (Alesis Digital Audio Tape)
Recording time: 40 minutes with S-VHS 120 cassette
Fast wind speed: 20x play speed with tape unwrapped
10x play speed with tape wrapped
Fast audio scan speed: 3x play speed
A/D conversion: 16 bit linear, Delta-Sigma 64 times oversampling, single convertor per channel.
Sample rate: 48kHz (varispeed 40.4 to 50.8kHz, +1, -3 semitones)
Frequency response: 20Hz to 20kHz +/-0.5dB
Dynamic range: > 92dB from 20Hz to 20kHz, A-weighted
Distortion: 0.009% THD + noise @ 1 kHz, 0.5dB below maximum output, A-weighted
Channel crosstalk: < -90dB @ 1kHz
Wow and Flutter: Unmeasurable
Connectors: 56-pin ELCO
16 quarter-inch jacks (8 input, 8 output)
2 EIAJ fibre optic (1 input, 1 output), Alesis Fibreoptic Multichannel protocol
The price was £3500, or just over £10,000 for 24 tracks of digital audio. Up until this point our choice for affordable multitrack was limited to analogue machines from brands like Tascam and Fostex.
For many of us, the ADAT was an audio miracle. A cost effective digital multitrack, which could be purchased for as little as £3500 for 8 tracks of audio and then expanded as required. It was as simple as buying a new machine and plugging in the sync cable.
Reviews at the time were favourable; Paul White writing for Sound On Sound in 1992 said;
“The very success of ADAT as an engineering exercise must surely sound the death knell for analogue tape machines in this sector of the market”
David Mellor, writing for Recording Musician in the same year said;
“I feel confident in saying that future musicians and engineers will look upon it as a milestone in audio development. It's not the first digital multitrack, and it certainly won't be the last, but it's the first one the ordinary person in the home or small studio can seriously consider owning. High-end professional digital multitrack users will also be keeping an eye on this development. It's unlikely that anyone will be throwing away their DASH or ProDigi reel-to-reel multitracks, because they are both proven formats with a very strong user base. But just as we now have an alternative to a Tascam or Fostex analogue multitrack in the small studio, ADAT is showing the Sonys, Mitsubishis, and Otaris of this world that there is another way of doing things. Well done Alesis.”
My ADAT Journey
I acquired my Alesis ADAT machines almost by accident. It was the late 90s and I’d decided to invest in new studio gear. I had first bought Emagic Logic but decided the learning curve was too hard and still wasn’t sure about the whole DAW concept. Thankfully the dealer said I could take back and swap it, so I went for two Alesis LX20 ‘Gold fronted’ ADAT machines. They offered a ‘modern’ high quality recording format at a fraction of the price of the pro alternatives and in many ways worked like conventional tape machines, which at this point I had been using for nearly 20 years.
The LX20 was considerably cheaper at about £1699 and was a better specification than the original ADAT, offering a new Type II format that offered 20bit recording. It felt cheaper too and was simpler, designed to work within a system controlled by the ENORMOUS Alesis BRC (Big Remote Control) remote. However, most people were buying the LX20 for one reason, it was significantly cheaper, once you added a BRC that added another £1599 to the price of entry. So most people, myself included, simply got by without it.
What I Loved About The ADAT
Given all that I’ve already written, what I loved about the ADAT should be self evident. Easy to use, low cost (for the time), easily expandable, digital recording. Given that up until this point most people buying them had been recording to conventional 8 and 16 track analogue tape machines, the ADAT was the holy grail of home and low cost recording studio machines.
The sync was simple to use too. As I’ve already said, you added another machine, plugged in a sync cable from the first to the second, or daisy chained as many as you needed, and you had more tracks. There was no SMPTE track to stripe, it just worked.
Here’s what Alesis claimed were the benefits of ADAT from the user manual. I’ll tell you how true each claim was;
Low tape cost. The LX20 can record over an hour of audio on a standard S-VHS tape cassette.
Partly true, with a 120min cassette you got 40 minutes of recording.Superb fidelity. The LX20 offers 20-bit recording to tape using the ADAT TypeII format, along with a choice of a 44.1 or 48 kHz sampling rate (with 64 timesoversampling), for better-than-CD quality sound.
True for the time. Up until that point and for the target market we were recording on analogue tape. Even with noise reduction from dbx or Dolby, it was OK but nothing like ADAT.Digital and analog inputs/outputs. In addition to conventional analog inputs and outputs, a "master" digital I/O carries all eight tracks simultaneously via optical cable, allowing for lossless signal transfers between ADAT interface-compatible devices (tape recorders, hard disk recorders, synthesizers, signal processors, etc.)
True. In fact, the only remnant of the ADAT machines is the ADAT optical standard still found on audio devices today. The recording format may have died but the protocol lives on!Easy expandability for more tracks. Multiple LX20s can be synchronized without any external hardware, and without giving up any tracks, to expand your digital recording system. Two LX20s give 16 tracks, three LX20s 24 tracks,and so on. Up to 16 LX20s or other ADAT-family digital recorders can worktogether, and all are locked within 20 microseconds (1 sample) accuracy.
True. One of the best things was the ease of expandability. Up until this point, adding more tracks, even from a MIDI sequencer always meant sacrificing a track for timecode.Included remote control. Each LX20 comes with the LRC (Little Remote Control)for remote control of transport, autolocation, and input select functions.
True. Even today’s manufacturers could take a leaf out of Alesis’ book, no gouging people who had just spent £3500 by selling the remote as an optional extra.Built-in time code. Each LX20 tape is formatted with a proprietary time code that is much more accurate than SMPTE, and time-stamps the tape with single-sample accuracy. This allows for machine synchronization without giving up an audio track, accurate tape counter readings without "slippage," and intelligent autolocation functions.
True. Although formatting tapes was a bit of pain, not because it was hard, but because it took up time. It wasn’t possible to throw a tape into the machine and hit record.
As you can see, for the time, the Alesis ADAT format was a brilliant proposition, compared to the alternatives. For the most part I loved mine.
Watch the video below showing an ADAT in use and the sound possible.
What Did I Hate?
First of all, ADATs were built for a price, and whilst the technology inside was a f*****g miracle for the time, they were a little clunky.
Even though the synchronisation system on the ADAT was simple, it wasn’t always elegant and you could spend time waiting for the machines to sync up. This meant giving yourself plenty of pre-roll when recording with the ADATs. None of this starting everything at zero like many do in the modern DAW. In fact for those of us who worked in tape formats, be that analogue or digital, we still add pre-roll at the start of our DAW recordings, just in case!
Rewinding took time, it did on analogue machines, so what’s the complain about? Well not only did rewind take time, every ADAT I ever used seemed to have the sound of a cat screeching during rewind. I’m sure it wasn’t a real issue, but it did lead me to think that at some point a tape was going to snap. Insecurity with your gear when you are laying down tracks is never good for positivity.
Finally, there were the dreaded error messages. The appendix ran to two pages in the user manual, it seemed that although they all meant different things, the most common suggested remedy was to turn the machine on and off again.
The machines could also be tempremental under certain conditions, acknowledge in the user manual;
“If your unit behaves erratically or "freezes," do not assume you need to clean the heads or perform any type of servicing. This situation can sometimes occur due to line voltage spikes, temporary brownouts, and other problems related to AC power.”
Summary
Reading about the ADAT in the DAW age can make one wonder what all the fuss is about. Recording 8 tracks on a VHS video cassette, why the excitement? Simple, in 1992 DAWs were still in their infancy and expensive, Pro Tools II TDM wouldn’t arrive for another two years and even then it was considerably more costly. In the early days DAWs were pretty complicated things to use, needing additional hardware.
Quite simply, ADAT was a recording milestone, one could suggest the bridge that took home recording from analogue to hard disk. It certainly improved the quality of home recordings and meant that small commercial studios could offer a high quality product, ready for CD, without having to mortgage their house to do so.
It wasn’t long before Tascam responded to the ADAT threat to their business and released what many felt was a far more professional format in their DA-88, although in tests this was less apparent. If nothing else the build quality of the Tascam machines felt better. However, writing for Sound on Sound at the time, Paul White said;
“There are no figures for hardware or data reliability for either format — they simply haven't been around for long enough — but if there is to be a winner in a format war, I feel that it will be decided on the track record that these machines establish in the field, and not by the PR propagated by the various proponents.”
On balance, the gripes most of us have about ADAT were far outweighed by the gains, and even now I regard my machines with fondness. Of course I’m looking back though rose tinted spectacles, but the stuff I made on them did get me a record and publishing deal… on that basis, I’d call them a success.
It’s also worth remembering that 30 years on the ADAT protocol continues to live on in many modern audio interfaces, that’s not a bad legacy to have.
What about you, did you own ADATs? What were your feelings about them.