- Transport (recording)
A transport is a device that handles a particular physical storage medium (such as
magnetic tape ,audio CD ,CD-R , 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 -gradeaudio CD transport, which houses noD/A converter, unlike most ordinary audio CD players. Instead, the audio CD transport is connected to an externalD/A converter via a coaxial (SPDIF ) or optical (Toslink ) digital audio connection to convert the digital audio information to analog for interfacing to most audio equipment.Here are some other examples of transports for recorded media:
* A 16-track magnetic
reel-to-reel tape recorder (using 1" wide tape) manufactured byHoneywell that was originally designed for recordinginstrumentation data, which was adapted for theSoundstream digital audio recording system developed in the mid-70s. It was in this case connected to external digital audio processing hardware designed by Soundstream,
* TheS-VHS videocassette mechanism utilized byADAT -format multi-track digital audio recorders made byAlesis ,
* TheHi8 videocassette mechanism utilized byDTRS -format multi-track digital audio recorders made byTascam such as theDA-88 , and
* A standardvideo cassette recorder used for recording digital audio with aPCM adaptor .
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.