Received my unit yesterday!
First off, to confirm once and for all:
Magnification settings done before starting a recording DO affect the level of the .wav brought into your DAWIt also saves your magnification settings on each channel after power down and swapping batteries, that's nice. It is incredibly small in person, more so even than in pictures. It's a solid mass and feels well built. It sits perched sturdily on a desk for those using it as an interface. The battery door is a bit thin and doesn't instill confidence in longevity but so are the ones on my Tascams and I haven't had a problem with those in 10 years. One thing I do not like is that after starting a recording, if you slide the record button up to record again, it stops the recording. Not a huge deal but the switch does move very easily and I can't imagine why it functions this way. I believe on most recorders pressing record again makes a new track or marks the file. What reason would you ever have to stop a recording so quickly that you can't take the time to hit the actual stop button--besides wanting either of the aforementioned actions? Even though you should be using the hold function, I still see no reason for that, it's just a liability.
I did a test recording some music and then room silence on the minimum and maximum magnification settings. The quieter file peaked at -43dB and the louder file +16dB. I normalized each to -.1dB and then listened to the silent portions. They were nearly indistinguishable, and I'm sure that in a controlled environment the noise floors would sound exactly the same.
For my Energizer E2 battery runtime test, I set it to 48kHz, lowered the headphone volume to zero (nothing connected), left the magnification to the stock 16x on both channels and ran 2 CCM 4 mics with 48V phantom power. Total record time was 6:37, which I'm very pleased with. That's about an hour less than my current recorders but with one less battery.
This is the perfect box for no fuss 2 channel XLR recording. I will likely pick up another for when I do matrix shows. Look forward to running it out in the field soon. Any other questions that can be answered just ask