I'm very happy with my purchase. P2 is a nice, solid, easy to use, decent sounding box.
Dickey Betts was pretty loud last night. 3 guitars and a thumping bass. P2 handled my 480s with no problems. Ran no pad. Had the box set at 4 on the dial, and was running between -3 and 0. Ran over a couple of times, but the P2 didn't distort. This box should handle Mule or any loud band pretty easily. And it does come with a -20 pad, just in case, but I didn't need it. Analyzed the wav files via Adobe Audition, and they were accurate.
Can't get over the battery consumption. Ran 2 hours last night, only dropped 2 bars on brand new Energizer AA 2500 mah rechargeables. Lost 1 bar on the get go, because it was the first charge of these bats out of the box. The meters are very accurate and easy to read too, from a full standing position with the P2 in a Rakgear bag. I hate crouching over my bag with a flashlight.
The sound of the P2 is a little flat, but warm and smooth, not quite as musical or transparent as my Busman UA5. But that's because this box was more geared towards Eng than what we do (aren't all of them?
). Not bad sounding at all for stock. I have no problems running stock until Oade comes out with his mods.
Transferring a 2 hour show via firewire is slower than transferring with my JB3. Took about 8 minutes for a 44.1/16 file. A little over double of what it takes the JB3. The time probably relates to the speed of my CF card (Kingston 50x). I bet you would get faster transfer times with an 150x card. I had previously formatted my card with the Marantz 660 and had music still on it. The P2 recognized the card and formatted it properly. I have yet to test whether a P2 formatted card can be accepted by a Marantz.
The box itself was a little warm at the end of the night. But not as warm as a JB3 can be.
I'm gonna run the P2 in a Rakgear bag. I'm a little nervous running upright in my current bag. The top on my bag has an inside compartment, where I throw accessories. Some are made of metal. Don't want to crack that big-ass screen while zipping the top up in a hurry. The P2 is slightly taller than my UA5 in the Walmart cage, too. Its nice to carry a bag that's 10 lbs lighter.
Only knock:
when you reformat a card, it reformats the entire P2 to factory settings. Tascam engineered the settings to be stored on the card, as opposed to the 671, which is stored in internal memory. No presets, which is an advantage of the 671. I plan on running 24/48 once I get a 4GB card. Eventually, I'll get an 8GB card, once the 16gb cards hits the market strong.
Below are some pics I took last night in the field. The recorder next to mine I believe was a Sony D8.