Dan Dugan wrote:
>> I ran into something similar a few months ago with my Sony MZ-NHF800
>> Hi-MD recorder, when trying to power a pair of 183s externally from a
>> 9-volt battery. It added a series of low-level clicks to the audio
>> every few seconds, exactly at points where I noted disk activity
>> during test recordings -- presumably writing data to the media. So
>> yea, it appears MD recorders buffer the incoming data stream and dump
>> to disk periodically. (I went back to PIP and the clicks
>> disappeared.)
>
> That last note is baffling to me; powering the mics externally should
> ease the drain on the battery, if it made any difference at all.
It was baffling to me as well. I mentioned it here at the time, and Rob
speculated it was some kind of interaction inside the recorder. It
occurred only on the Hi-MD, and not on my TDC-D7 DAT or the NT-1 Micro
DAT. Too bad, since it seemed to increase headroom on the 183s.
> What I heard was a very low level martian chatter that would have been
> covered by the mic hiss if I had been recording at my normal level;
> maybe the second site had a slightly higher ambience that masked it?
If you're saying your mics picked up the recorder's write-to-disk
activity acoustically, I've run into that problem too. It ruined an
otherwise great sunset wilderness recording back in April. These MD
mechanisms seem to be a wee bit noisy, and sometimes need to be
muffled.
Curt Olson
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