Musings on a mobile recording setup.

Reminds me of the oscillations of the DA-P1 pre-amp at high gain. Mine went back for patching to Tascam. Good to know as having to use an external phantom supply kind of defeats the idea of the DR-680.

Don't know about soundfield mics but as long as it aren't 7 pin Lemo OB size it should be fine...

Oh, no it's nothing like that - it's a mini 12-pin  Lemo!

Since I found out about Lemo's cable making service, I haven't felt the need to solder one of their connectors. They're very reasonably priced although maybe not the fastest of turnarounds.

James.

Fortunately the Soundfield cables are pretty well made, and I didn't have to do anything. Hopefully if I look after them, I won't have to! I'm not sure whether the firm make them up themselves or not - trying to get an empty current-style cable drum out of them has proved to be difficult; apparently they all come in pre-loaded, and with the cable trapped at one end. But hey, that might be just an excuse; I'm going to find a different approach to this anyway, so it hardly matters.

I've just ordered one of these - http://tascam.com/product/dr-60d/ - to add to my mobile setup.  Chiefly for its intended purpose - DSLR video - but also makes an inexpensive location recorder with some handy features, that doesn't look like a "shaver" and doesn't have unnecessary built in mics.  MS support included so for a really minimalist rig, that with my Sennheiser MS pair and a pair of cans should work well.  (And it can write a safety track as well as the main pair at anything up to 12dB below the main tracks).

   That's a neat bit of kit.

Yeah - I think that Tascam are going to make a bit of a killing with those, at the price they're selling them for.

Hopefully they have managed to get rid of the unnecessary 9 ... 13 dB of unnecessary noise as in the original DR-680 !

Hopefully they have managed to get rid of the unnecessary 9 ... 13 dB of unnecessary noise as in the original DR-680 !

No doubt ozpeter will soon tell us if they haven't 

Indeed a nice piece of kit. Makes it even more difficult to choose. Until now I was leaning towards the DR-680 but the mic issue made me a bit reluctant to go that way. The RME is tempting but not for the use I'd make of it. But this DR-60 and 4 mic preamps wouldn't be that hard to carry along either and easy to feed on battery. Choices...

Looks like my DR-60D will arrive at the end of this week or beginning of next - they've sent me my tracking number.  Watch this space... yes, it has four mic preamps but only one pair has phantom, the other being designed for typical camera mics which use plug in power on small connectors.  Still, that should work with some Naiant mics - of which I have some - possibly over reasonably long mic leads - I'll test that.

...that should work with some Naiant mics

They're pretty neat as well - great value for money .  All told, should make a nice portable rig

With my older US-122 series Tascam interfaces, the noise problem appeared when one of the two main channels had phantom power switched on and a condenser mic connected and the other main input had power off and was in use with a guitar or a dynamic mic.

The DR-60DThe does look a nice unit.

I have just today done the mod that Bert proposed, which he has had done to his DR-680s as well.  It is simply to increase the size of the capacitor to earth from each channel's phantom feed from 0.5uF (which is implemented by two 1uF capacitors in series - perhaps because the surface-mount components don't have the required voltage rating) to 47uF.

Actually, I have only done four of the six channels, because they can be reached merely by removing the covers, whereas the last two channels require the entire unit to be stripped down into its component parts; but I only use four channels, so that's OK for me.  I haven't done any measurements yet beyond checking that the unit still works - I have several recordings to do this month, so I'll report back after that.

The capacitors are stuck with silicone sealer to others on the back of the board, because that's where there's room:

The wires are brought round the the front of the board where the most suitable points to solder them are:


When I have time to make an actual measurement, I can do comparisons rather easily by putting a mic into each of a modified and an unmodified channel.

Having now looked at the size of that socket board, I find it rather hard to believe that with a sensible redesign, there wouldn't be room for some sensible caps on it. Looking more and more like a Tascam intellectual cockup to me...

Just so.  Each channel already has two caps of the same spec (the ones my additional one is glued to) for the signal lines; there's plenty of space to have a third going to the phantom power injection point.