Small problem discovered where my I've been able to repeat a situation where my MixPre-3 DID NOT shut down gracefully when power was lost.
I've got a bunch of Tekkeon 3300 batteries which are fantastic for powering my gear all weekend without worrying about recharges at a festival. I recently bought the Cable Technologies MX-powersled (the one with the Hirose connector) for my Mixpre-3, so I decided to conduct run time tests on all of the batteries to get a feel for which of the batteries are still in good shape and which might be starting to go bad.
So far, I've run 14 batteries through the test and 3 times the recorder DID NOT write the file header information properly before the shutdown occurred. Strangely, the other 11 times the file was written fine. When I pull up the file in the MixPre-3 projects menu to determine how long the battery lasted, the file is showing zero minutes. When I try to load the file in my DAW (Adobe Audition), it won't load and I get messages about the header info being bad.
The good news however is that when I load the file into CDWav, it assumes that the file is a WAV file and corrects the header information and properly loads the file. I then save the file from CDWav and it's fixed. Then I can open it up in Audition for mastering, so in the end it's no big deal.
My thoughts are that the sled provides a regulated power supply to the MixPre-3. Perhaps since the power level is regulated, the voltage being provided to the unit doesn't drop off at all prior to the battery going dead, which somehow doesn't give the MixPre-3 enough time to write the file header info before it loses power.
Anyway, since I have been able to recover the file with CDWav, so far it's not really that big a deal to me, but it's concerning all the same and thought I should pass along my discovery.
I'll be contacting Sound Devices and providing them with details.