Portable DAT Walkman and Sound Quality
 

How good is the sound quality for portable DAT walkmans when recording location dialogue?

Good. But they are technology on the way out. I'd not buy a new one these days.

What are some new replacement technologies for small portable DATs?

DAT has the best possible quality out there for portable at 48kHz sampling rate.

It's tape format so it has it's downsides.

MDs, wireless mics are good portable replacements. You can also put in the game field mixers or even small HD multitrack recorder - options are unlimited.

Products like the Marantz MD670 solid state recorder are starting to knock DAT out of the box.

At less that $1,000, the Marantz, for example will record 1.5 hours of stereo sound on a 1 gig memory card at 48 Khz in PCM recording mode.

In MP3 mode, it will record stereo for 7 hours at at 48 Khz sampling rate and a storage rate of 320 mbps.

The small MP3 'jukeboxes' that record are also starting to be an option. I just finished modifying a little $80 MP3 recorder/player to use as a narration source for a Lost Boat (submarine) memorial. The sound quality is excellent for voice.

Before you run out and buy one of these little jewels, understand that only a few of them have a microphone input and they tend to be the more expensive of them I'M TOLD (I haven't seen one myself.) So you use an outboard box to drive them.

Jay Rose covers this very issue in his column, "September Song," in the September issue of DV Magazine. He certainly believes that DAT is on its way.

Very good point Mike,
thanks for the overview of the new possibilities!

MP3 as Recorder
 

Hmmm...I was thinking about using an MP3 recorder as a dialogue recorder...but how good does the MP3 format work with any post-processing?

Works fine for me.