no problems with batteries but my scandisk 4gb cf cards no longer hold 6:28 in 16/44, one card says 4 hrs and another says 2:50.
any links to a thread that covers this weirdness?
You didn't mention the age of the cards but the "cells" which store the information do eventually "burn out" with use. This is normal and the CF interface should "ignore" the dead cells in the same way that the hard disks of your computer ignore bad/damaged disk sectors. As the cells "die", it'd make sense that there would be a corresponding reduction in capacity.
But the typical "guaranteed" life is 100,000 write cycles before failure (or one per day for almost 274 years). High-quality cells can withstand over a million writes. In other words; if the card lives up to CF specifications, it should last quite a bit longer than the owner. If it's doesn't, that means that something is wrong with the card. There have been numerous reports of counterfeit SanDisk cards being sold on eBay (and elsewhere). If your card isn't counterfeit, Sandisk's warranty is five years. I'd suggest taking advantage of it if you can. Lexar's warranty is "lifetime" and, frankly, that alone is worth any reasonable addition to up-front cost.
Similar to Marantz's own implicit and explicit advice, I suggest that you use Lexar CF cards with the PMD660. The only caution: Marantz told me that Lexar's new UDMA CF cards will NOT work in the PMD660 (one can presume that it's an interface issue and that other UDMA cards won't work either). That sort of bandwidth is unnecessary, in any case, for recording 16 bit audio or, one might argue, for USB 1.0 (and even USB 2.0) transfers. And the UDMA cards are ridiculously expensive at the moment. Anyway...
My PMD660 shipped with a 512MB Lexar Platinum II card (80X speed). I take that as a statement from Marantz that the two products play nicely together. I decided to go whole-hog with my "workhorse" card and bought an 8GB Platinum II from Adorama (the only e-tailer who had them in stock at the time). To save you from doing the math; that amounts to just over 12.5 hours of recording time. WAV does have a 4GB size limit (because of the size of the file header) but, honestly, I haven't used more than 6GB of memory at any one show (all-day events with multiple performances).
Anyway; Lexar, Lexar, Lexar. Have a lucky day!
