Transport (recording)

A transport is a device that handles a particular physical storage medium (such as

magnetic tape Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use magnetic ...

audio CD Compact Disc Digital Audio (CDDA or CD-DA), also known as Digital Audio Compact Disc or simply as Audio CD, is the standard format for audio compact discs. The standard is defined in the '' Red Book'' technical specifications, which is why t ...

CD-R CD-R (Compact disc-recordable) is a digital media, digital optical disc data storage device, storage format. A CD-R disc is a compact disc that can only be Write once read many, written once and read arbitrarily many times. CD-R discs (CD-Rs) ...

, or other type of recordable media) itself, and extracts or records the information to and from the medium, to (and from) an outboard set of processing electronics that the transport is connected to. A transport houses no electronics itself for encoding and decoding the information recorded to and from a certain format of media. It only extracts and records information to the media, as well as handling mechanical operations for accessing the media itself, such as playing or rewinding a tape, or accessing the tracks on a disc. An example of a transport for a storage medium would be an

audiophile An audiophile (from + ) is a person who is enthusiastic about high-fidelity sound reproduction. The audiophile seeks to achieve high sound quality in the audio reproduction of recorded music, typically in a quiet listening space in a room with ...

-grade

transport, which houses no

digital-to-analog converter In electronics, a digital-to-analog converter (DAC, D/A, D2A, or D-to-A) is a system that converts a digital signal into an analog signal. An analog-to-digital converter (ADC) performs the reverse function. DACs are commonly used in musi ...

(DAC), unlike most ordinary audio CD players. Instead, the audio CD transport is connected to an external DAC via a coaxial ( SPDIF) or optical ( Toslink) digital audio connection to convert the digital audio information to analog for interfacing to most audio equipment. Other examples of transports for recorded media include: * A 16-track magnetic

reel-to-reel Reel-to-reel audio tape recording, also called open-reel recording, is magnetic tape audio recording in which the recording tape is spooled between reels. To prepare for use, the ''supply reel'' (or ''feed reel'') containing the tape is plac ...

tape recorder (using 1" wide tape) manufactured by

Honeywell Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building automation, industrial automa ...

(the model 5600E) that was originally designed for recording

instrumentation Instrumentation is a collective term for measuring instruments, used for indicating, measuring, and recording physical quantities. It is also a field of study about the art and science about making measurement instruments, involving the related ...

data, which was adapted for the Soundstream digital audio recording system developed in the mid-70s, and referred to by Soundstream as the "HTD" or ''Honeywell Tape Drive''. It was in this case connected to external digital audio processing hardware (the "DTR", or ''Digital Tape Recorder'', although it housed just the electronics for the HTD) designed by Soundstream, * The

S-VHS S-VHS, the common initialism for Super VHS, is an analog video cassette format introduced by JVC in 1987 as an improved version of the VHS (Video Home System) format. S-VHS improved image quality by increasing the bandwidth of the luminance ...

videocassette mechanism utilized by

ADAT Alesis Digital Audio Tape, commonly referred to as ADAT, is a magnetic tape format used for the Sound recording and reproduction, recording of eight digital audio tracks onto the same S-VHS tape used by consumer VCRs, and the basis of a serie ...

-format multi-track digital audio recorders made by Alesis, * The

Hi8 The 8mm video format refers informally to three related videocassette formats. These are the original Video8 format (analog video and analog audio but with provision for digital audio), its improved variant Hi8, as well as a more recent digit ...

videocassette mechanism utilized by DTRS-format multi-track digital audio recorders made by

Tascam TASCAM is the professional audio division of TEAC Corporation, headquartered in Tokyo Japan. TASCAM established the Home Recording phenomenon by creating the "Project Studio" and is credited as the inventor of the Portastudio, the first casset ...

such as the DA-88, and * A standard

video cassette recorder A videocassette recorder (VCR) or video recorder is an electromechanical device that records analog audio and analog video from broadcast television or other AV sources and can play back the recording after rewinding. The use of a VCR to ...

(particularly using

U-matic U-matic, also known as -inch Type E Helical Scan or SMPTE E, is an analog recording videocassette format developed by Sony. First shown as a prototype in October 1969 and introduced commercially in September 1971, it was among the earliest vi ...

cassettes) used for recording

digital audio Digital audio is a representation of sound recorded in, or converted into, digital signal (signal processing), digital form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is typically encoded as numerical sampling (signal processing), ...

with a PCM adaptor. Audio storage {{Sound-tech-stub