Ask an Audio geek

[Kosh]

DAT was/is 16bit 48000 khz lossless afaik, so a little bit better than CD. They had their niche, I almost bought one. I once borrowed an MD device from a teacher for a simple live recording I had to do, but was never tempted to buy one because by the time I would have considered it, I had a discman that could read burnt CDs.

The big issue with DAT is that it was a tape   It was still a sequential media and subject to all the issues that come with tape.  I had a DAT data backup system for my Amiga computer back in the early 90's.