So... I've been recording for less than a year with decent results by my standards. That said, the issue I had early on was that this recorder sucked up batteries. I use an phantom power (48v) supply and I'd be lucky to get three hours of record time before having to swap out for another set of Duracells. I came to accept this as 'normal'. Well, I had an incident this weekend while taping at AURA where I was watching the recorder to see if it was going to last through a particularly long set. Towards the end of this set (battery having been on one bar for close to an hour) I noticed that the left channel wasn't recording. The set ended shortly after and I went to trouble shooting, beginning with swapping out the mics to see if one had gone bad. Having done that, the left channel was still not picking up. Next, I replaced the batteries. Bingo! Both channels were back to recording again, and continued to do so for the duration of the festival. Then, a V8 moment. What if my recorder was providing phantom power to the mic? I went through my presets to see if I had missed a toggle somewhere but couldn't find anything. I would have to get back to civilization to continue troubleshooting.
Back home I found my users manual and found a switch on the bottom of the unit that says P48 ON OFF. I've had it in the OFF position with the assumption that the 661 would NOT provide power to the mics in this position. I looked a little closer though and saw a third option for this toggle, which is the LINE setting.
Am I correct in assuming that this is supposed to be in the LINE position?