Topic: what went wrong last night?? tascam HD-P2 content

[Gordon]

kinda long....


so yesterday we went to a friends wedding.  they had a kick ass zep cover band play.  being the taper friend that I am I offered to tape them.

so I set up and am good to go.  running 24/48 coax in from V3 with 1.5 gig splits, a external battery and internal AA's.  first set went just fine.  I started recording about 10 mins before the second set started.  set started and was much louder than the first.  clipped a few times (no big deal, it's a V3) and backed the trim down a bit.

I checked the levels on the v3 a few times throughout the set and was fine.  anyway when the set was over I go to turn everything off and the P2 isn't recording     .  I know I started it and turned the hold switch on.  most of the time my bag was closed and the few times I checked levels I didn't notice no red light on the P2, doesn't mean it was on . 

so we get back to the room and I check the card (on the tascam, not computer)  shows three files.  one is the complete first set 942mb, one is 242 mb and the third is 787kb.  since the hold was on I'm thinking it's the card (kingston 8gb 45x).  I ran it 24/96 last weekend no problems.  I do a media scan and it locks up (freezes) the P2 less than half way through.  I left it for 10-15 mins and it never went any further.  the only way to stop it was to disconnect power (I know not to during a scan) but it locked the P2 up so I had no choice.

get home today and put it in the card reader.  files copy over just fine.  open them in wavelab.  set one is complete.  the second file is 14 mins.  about 10 of which is just crowd and 4 min or so is part of the first song.  the third file is 2 secs of crowd from the end of the night (checked the time created).

I checked my other 2 cards and they don't lock up on a scan.

so since I got the files off I put the card back in and tried to scan again.  something.  locks up about 30% of the way and had to disconnect power to unlock it.  I then formated the card and it scans just fine and says all volumes agree.

things different last night than last weekend.  my default project are 24/96.  right before I changed the project (not default) to 24/48.

new right angle coax from nic.  very nice cable and fits snug as hell.  don't see how it could have gotten knocked loose at all.

also I've never clipped that many times in a row (5 + in say 10 secs).  actually wavelab doesn't show them as clips but the V3 did.

so it looks to me like

a)  the card "went bad".  again only running 24/48 & it recorded a 2 sec file a hour or more after it stopped the second file

b)  the coax lost signal.  worked just fine first set and fits snug as hell. 

c)  the P2 just stopped recording for unknown reasons.


someone could very well have kicked the bag, tripped over it etc.  I wasn't baby sitting the gear and just had the bag closed and at the back of the dance floor in front of the pole I had the stand set up on.  if it was kicked/tripped over it couldn't have been too hard.  would sudden movement cause something like this??  I mean I know it could if the bag was kicked like hell but I doubt it was.


what are the meter decay rate and meter peak decay??  I haven't messed with those & both are set to medium decay.  the manual doesn't tell what they are.  I googled peak decay and one link said it should be set to hold but didn't tell what it was for.

thoughts??


I'm gonna play around with everything tomorrow and run some test but wanted to post here for others opinions. 

[boojum]

My first guess is that the bag was accidentally dinged by someone there.  Damned shame.  Good thing this was not your "make or break" entrance into the world of professional recording. 

[Gordon]

My first guess is that the bag was accidentally dinged by someone there.

would this  cause the card to fuck up though?  and how would it then record 2 secs over an hour after it stopped?

[stirinthesauce]

My 2 guesses, the bag got dinged and the coax cable lost signal for a brief second.

Something with the batteried caused a bit of a glitch. 

I'm guessing situation one though.


I'm not an expert, just a speculator 

[Gordon]

My 2 guesses, the bag got dinged and the coax cable lost signal for a brief second.

lost signal for over and hour and then back for 2 secs?!  if it were for a second or two I would think that.  who knows 

[boojum]

Gordon -  You are about the only one who can figure it out.  You were there.  You saw stuff you may have forgotten.  And so on.  For us to speculate on the basis of your impressions and what you remember is pretty fruitless, unless Sam Spade is out there somewhere.  Coulda been the moon was in the second house.  You got a bad pull.  Sorry.   

[Nicola Fankhauser]

hi

mechanical shock may have induced some temporarily disconnection between batteries and recorder, or the card and its slot. my reasoning: since you report a badly formatted card that was fine again after being reformatted, the recorder was interrupted during writing and was left in an undefined state.

regards
nicola

[Gordon]

Gordon -  You are about the only one who can figure it out.  You were there.  You saw stuff you may have forgotten.  And so on.  For us to speculate on the basis of your impressions and what you remember is pretty fruitless, unless Sam Spade is out there somewhere.  Coulda been the moon was in the second house.  You got a bad pull.  Sorry.   

I saw nothing   I wasn't baby sitting the gear.  I don't think it's fruitless to ask what others think.  b/c in this hobby all sorts of problems happen and MANY times the same problems happen to other tapers.  the same type of thing could have happened to someone else, period.  I didn't feel like reading through 20 + pages of team threads etc looking for a similar experience.  so I posted.

hi

mechanical shock may have induced some temporarily disconnection between batteries and recorder, or the card and its slot. my reasoning: since you report a badly formatted card that was fine again after being reformatted, the recorder was interrupted during writing and was left in an undefined state.

regards
nicola

seems like what must of happened.  I would lean towards the card since I had two battery sources and it seems very unlikely that both my external and the internal AA's would have come loose.  still doubting it was the coax as well as that was the first thing I checked when I saw that it wasn't recording.

[JackoRoses]

I had a incident several months back. Not quite related to this but thought I would share here.
I'm still not sure what the heck happened but it hasn't happened since either.
I was at a festival and I was recording zero. Nothing during the recording happened to make me think otherwise yet I had issues.
When I made it home and was dumping the recordings off to my computer everything looked ok also.
When I started listening back to the zero recording and was tracking it out... Somehow someway the recording wasn't all zero. Somehow a show I recorded a day earlier ended up on the Zero track.
I was formatting my cards everyday at the beginning of the day and Zero was the 2nd band I recorded on my CF card that day. The first band came out fine with no issues in the recording.
So basically I have a zero recording and about 30 minutes or so into the recording you hear a glitch (drop out) and the day befores band cues right in where the zero dropped out. Towards the end of the recording the zero music came back and finished off.
I lost probably a song and half which with zero is what 20 minutes?
I don't even know how I could try and recreate this issue but as I mentioned I haven't experienced this since thankfully.
Hope I made a somewhat coherent post here. I'm not sure what happened nor how to explain it any better really.
I never had that problem yet Gordon but what happened to me is similar here except I managed to get music just the wrong band

[OOK]

My experience has been that if the HDP2 loses it signal it stops recording.  I learned that the coax output of my minme is lose which caused this to happen in my situation. 

Just an added note the HDP2 does take an AES digital signal from a minime.  This was a question I never really got answered a few months back.  So I had to test it out myself to confirm it works. 

T+ for your trouble.  OOK

[kirk97132]

The only problem I have had, besides an operator error happened when I just kept erasing my card and reusing it without reformatting it.  Since then I reformat my cards every time I go to use them.  I haven't had one problem since.  Not sure what happened to you, I'd guess the card.  Did you reformat before you used it?  If not I'd recommend a reformat before you use it, that one simple operation solved my problems, kirk

[Gordon]

been reformatting before every show.  I'm going with the bag being kicked etc.

[rodeen]

FWIW, I haven't reformatted my CF in 6 to 9 months.  I just delete the files and away I go.  Never had a problem.