Hi All!
I would like to tell you my story of how I met DCC and how I was struggling with it.
My name is Alexander and I’m from Belarus. For the last two years I live in Poland. My main interests for the whole life were retrocomputers and obsolete video formats. I was also interested in reel-to-reel tape machines.
I’ve heard so much about DAT cassette format, there is a big community of enthusiasts who were trying to involve me into their “DAT-church”, but at that time I was not so much interested in digital audio tapes. I knew that DCC was more rare and expensive than DAT, and that almost no one owns sych an equipment in Belarus.
Shortly after relocating to Poland I started thinking about trying to find some DCC-recorder. It was the end of 2022, @640k made a series of publications about DCC-format at habr.com. From that point my DCC-story begins.
I’ve bought my first DCC-recorder at local marketplace, it was DCC951. It was sold as a partly defective unit - it had bad left analog channel playback, but right channel and DCC playback and recording was OK. I thought that I will be able to repair analogue playback just by replacing SMD caps. That was a mistake - all caps in DCC951 were OK, and I’ve just spent some time on doing unnecessary job. Unfortunately this recorder had some issues in recording. AUX track was recording good on an empty tape, but renumbering and text labeling was not working OK - recorder often missed track marks when winding.
Ok, then I decided to buy another one. It was DCC730. Sold as untested. As a result - unit had both analogue channel playback issues, and DCC recording was unreliable - much worse than DCC951 I’ve bought before. Playback was good. I presented this deck to my father - he has never seen such decks and was very pleased.
Third one was DCC730 sold as faulty for 50$ - it was again a mistake buying this - total crap, the head had major scratches on it, one digital channel is blind, so playback worked unreliably - unusable.
After that I decided that DCC is not for me hehe))) I decided to stop. Ha-ha))))
About after half a year auction with DCC600 appeared on the local marketplace. I won this auction for a good price, and that was my first DCC with a working analogue playback! I thought DCC part was working fully, but no - one channel had bad recording capability - it only worked on a bulk-erased tape.
Then I had a chance to buy another DCC730, which had excellent head condition - this is now my main deck, it plays and records with excellent quality, tapes recordered here could be played back on all my DCC decks.
I have read much info about DCC900 and its capacitors, so I decided to also but some 900s for a low price. So I have two 900s and one Marantz DD-82 which I will try to repair in the future. It will be like a challenge for me, I hope one of them has good head.
Then I’ve found a great material from @Jac, about hacking the DCC175. He inspired me to dig deeper into the DCC Standard and study it page-by-page to find the way, how to preserve prerecorded tapes, how to make a full copy of the prerecorded tape, and also how to dump and visualize ITTS.
So my goal became to search for a DCC175 with a cable. I found a DCC170 at local market, to study its mechanism, it was a total junk but I was able to repair it and even get good W&F on analog tapes and 100% good playback and record on DCC tapes.
This summer I’ve bought DCC-Link cable, two DCC175 in a good cosmetics, and two DCC175 in a real junk state. So now I’m trying to repair one of junk 175’s and make a tape dumper from it. Studying the materials from @Jac on hackaday, studying DCC-Standard, it is clear that it is 100% possible to create a tape image, which then could be recordered back. Unfortunately it is not clear for me if DCC175 is able to record SYSINFO metadata back or not, this is what I’m going to research. At least it is clear that custom MCU for DCC730 or DCC170/175 can perform any custom metadata recording.
So that’s my DCC-story, I’m a newbie to DCC, but I think I can help the DCC community with creating a solution for tape preservation, duplication and, maybe if I’ll not burn out, some tool for mastering own tapes with SYSINFO metadata.
Another great idea is to make some open-source solution for ITTS visualizing on the PC from extracted tape dumps. Initial idea is to make a converter from ITTS to the teletext’s T42 format used by vhs-teletext software, but that’s another story)))
Thank you all guys for making this format still alive!
Best regards,
Alexander
