ADAT
More info
- Creator
- Alesis
- Released
- 1991
- Type
- Tape recorder, optical audio interface
An eight-track digital tape machine from 1991 that died out — and an optical cable from the same box that lives on in almost every audio interface.
Alesis unveiled ADAT in 1991: eight tracks of 16-bit, 48 kHz audio on ordinary S-VHS cassettes, for a fraction of what digital multitrack machines cost. Several units could be locked together for 24, 32 or more tracks, and the home studio arrived in earnest. Hard-disk recording in a DAW made the tape redundant around the turn of the century.
What survived was Lightpipe, ADAT's way of moving audio between machines: eight channels over a single optical TOSLINK fibre, the same connector as S/PDIF. At 96 kHz, S/MUX splits each channel across two and the count drops to four. It remains the cheapest way to add eight mic inputs to an audio interface — a tape recorder remembered for its cable.