Is there any degradation of the audio when the ADAT heads are dirty, as is the case with analog recorders?
The audio quality of the data recorded on an ADAT with dirty heads will not be degraded. With ADAT, dirty heads primarily affect the FORMATTING of new tapes. If a tape is formatted on an ADAT with dirty heads, the result of the formatting may be a bad internal sync pulse which, in time, will degrade to an “ERR 7” condition.
