Digital Audio Tape is a signal recording and playback medium developed by Sony

Sony

, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....

 and introduced in 1987. In appearance it is similar to a compact audio cassette, using 4 mm magnetic tape

Magnetic tape

Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic recording, made of a thin magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic. It was developed in Germany, based on magnetic wire recording. Devices that record and play back audio and video using magnetic tape are tape recorders and video tape recorders...

 enclosed in a protective shell, but is roughly half the size at 73 mm × 54 mm × 10.5 mm. As the name suggests, the recording is digital

Digital

A digital system is a data technology that uses discrete values. By contrast, non-digital systems use a continuous range of values to represent information...

 rather than analog. DAT has the ability to record at higher, equal or lower sampling rates than a CD

Compact Disc

The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...

 (48, 44.1 or 32 kHz sampling rate

Sampling rate

The sampling rate, sample rate, or sampling frequency defines the number of samples per unit of time taken from a continuous signal to make a discrete signal. For time-domain signals, the unit for sampling rate is hertz , sometimes noted as Sa/s...

 respectively) at 16 bit

Bit

A bit is the basic unit of information in computing and telecommunications; it is the amount of information stored by a digital device or other physical system that exists in one of two possible distinct states...

s quantization

Quantization (sound processing)

In signal processing and digital audio, quantization is the process of approximating a continuous range of values by a relatively small set of discrete symbols or integer values...

.