Hello,
This is my first post. I'm a film sound designer based in Eastern Europe and I've been looking into the TASCam DR-680 for more than 3 years now, but all this time I focused on investing in my sound studio. For 2015 I need to get a portable work-horse, a reliable, versatile 12 channel quiet, clean, detailed recorder capable of recording at least 12 tracks, and also 2 tracks in 192Khz for SFX work, and I'm pretty set on buying two DR680's.
So for the last couple of months I've been reading all I can find about it, watching reviews and videos of comparison tests.
I've read all 2138 posts in this looong thread - feels like a novella
However there are still some things which are not clear to me, so I will make a short resume of what I don't understand clearly, while also writing down what I feel is important for me to learn about this recorder.
It will be a long thread I guess and I hope somebody else also benefits from it.
Major issues with these devices are reported to be:
A. File loss/corruption when decks loses power while recording, problem aggravated by not using a supported SD card freshly formatted in the unit itself.
B. Badly designed power source, in more than one way:
B1 Improper voltage regulators, no fuse for over-voltage leading to bricked units with some voltage auto-sensing batteries.
B2 Dual-powering system glitchy, sometimes switching from external battery to internal AA's even if those are almost drained, also leaving the "AC in" icon turned on on the display.
B3 Bad design leading to serious overheating of the power source (lower back side of the unit?) causing random glitches when used with Phantom Power ON in heat (random popping sounds on recording, cyclical volume pumping, channels disappearing, decks freezing) especially if set in a bag (even the recommended CS680). This was reported only with 9V "DVD" external battery as far as I know.
C. With some microphones, the DR680 is reported to have unacceptable amounts of preamp noise (+12dB) when the phantom power is set to ON, there is even a mod indicating how to get rid of this problem - apparently the filtering capacitor of 0.5 uf (2x1uF in series) used to filter the phantom power just at the node before the feeding resistors of 2x3.3 kOhms is much too low to eliminate the audio noise
generated by the internal 48 V converter, so replacing those capacitors is needed for a 12 dB preamp noise improvement with certain mics.
D. Susceptible to electromagnetical interference, some users reported hearing high frequency pop-like spikes overlapping on the recording when certain batteries were close to (not even plugged in) the recorder.
E. "The only unresolvable problem in the DR680, also shared by the DR60 and all other lower priced Tascam recorders, is that the limiter is not in the first stage, as it should be" - quoting
Carlos E. Martinez, Reply #215
F. Badly designed speaker - hissy, impossible to turn off except with a jack plugged in the auto-sensing Headphone-out jack
G. Badly designed headphone amp - very noisy, digital volume control unresponsive, lags behind and sounds like a zipper file, without zero-crossing detection
H. TRS Jacks 5/6 can cause popping on recording (one unit here had such a problem, was fixed with a contact cleaner called Progold)
I. The level indicators are weird - showing "0" where "-2dB" actually is. Also they don't show the actual value in dB. and only have a single reference point.
J. The unit will drain internal AA-sized batteries even when powered down, which could lead to batteries leaking if forgotten in the recorder for an extended period of time. However, there appear to be two ways of powering down the device: a stand-by mode presumably entered by pressing the power button once, and a turn-off mode which implies pressing and holding the power button for three seconds, waiting for the unit to shut down, and then engaging the lock switch. If properly powered down, the internal batteries should not drain.
K. Support with TASCAM is pretty bad, they apparently want to have 3 tries at repairing the unit before replacing, which could mean up to two months for somebody in the states, but a lot more for someone like me, living in Eastern Europe.
Except for a certain mr. Chang, there's nobody at TASCAM who's willing and knowledgeable to help with troubleshooting.
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Before ending, I'd like to say that I know many people have a love-hate relationship to the 680.
Perhaps some people who spent 4000$ on a Sound Devices unit think they have the right to say the 680 is not a reliable machine, but I don't think it's fair. In comparison to the SD, yes, they may have a point, but this is mostly to the fact that the TASCAM is not as fool-proof as the SD is. Yes, I meant fool-proof. Film recording mixers who work 16 or 18 hour days recording take after take in freezing cold/blistering heat/God knows what weird conditions will know what I mean - even the best professionals are prone to errors, especially when tired, and SD have designed and built their products with such situations in mind. Their price reflects this. However, I have witnessed cases of SD 744, 788 and even the new 664 freezing and needing reboots. No system is perfect.
Keeping this in mind, there was a list compiled here on this thread with good and bad 680's, and also stating the malfunctions and the apparent causes. I don't think the list has much importance, because the world of tapers is very small in comparison to the hundreds (thousands?) of units produced and sold, and also people who have working units don't tend to google forums and praise their units, but in comparison, the people whose units malfunction (including due to operator error!) google forums and rant about how bad these units are and how crappy Tascam is.
I've never seen a driver who drove a red light and crashed blame the car manufacturer though.
Hope I didn't bore you.
And Happy Holidays
Topic: TASCAM DR-680 portable 8-track #6 (Read 109015 times)