Ok, received my WMOD 661 from Doug Oade yesterday.
My first impression of the unit physically:
1. Solid feel, well built, not "cheap" feeling in any respect.
2. Very intuitive menu controls and operation. I set up all my presets and settings in a few min.
3. I personally love the "brick" layout, although I know some folks are not as big on it.
4. Doug's workmanship is invisible, short of the sticker in the battery compartment and the plaque affixed in a non-descript spot on the underside of the unit. He just barely scratched the paint on the case screws.
5. SD card slot operation is smooth and easy, just like one in a good digital camera. I wish the SD slot cover had a lock screw like the 670/671, though.
6. I found the AA battery compartment a little tight on the unit I received. I felt like it took too much force and wrangling to get each battery seated between the contacts. I guess tight may be good, as the batteries will maintain a tight connection even with the recorder being jostled. It could just need to "break in" after a few insertions.
My first recording with it:
My 2 1/2 year old son has all types of music around him almost constantly, so he has become a little singer lately. He does this really cool medley of pieces of different songs that is absolutely precious. So, I plugged my 461s directly into the WMOD661 (mic sens at 0)and hand held them about a foot or so away from him and told him to sing, and he went right into his medley with air guitar and everything, about 10 mins worth.
I popped the card into the PC and played it, and all I can say is WOW. The immediate impression I got was how realistic and natural the recording sounded. Sometimes, recordings enhance sounds that were not as prominent live, and fail to reproduce sounds that were. Not this unit. Even playing back on cheap Dell desktop speakers, the recording sounded like my son was standing right there singing it again. Rich, full, and sweet, with no audible hiss whatsoever. He also leaned closer to the mic a couple of times and sang a couple of loud verses that totally hit "over" hard, and it is visibly brink walled, but not really audible. No distortion. Nice!!
I am not sure what aspects of my own personal experience can be chalked up to the warm mod, but so far I really like what I hear. Going to break the deck in for real at The Bridge here in Richmond next Friday and I will report back with my results from that show.
One more thing, I tried to get Doug to explain to me the difference between the concert and warm mods before I bought the 661, and had about six exchanges until I got what I needed to make the call.
In both mods Doug upgrades the XLR input capacitors. The Concert mod upgrades the op amps on the XLR inputs with bipolar transistors, same type used in the stock unit, only much better. Warm mod upgrades the op amps on the XLR inputs with FETs, which act more like valves, so they have that warm "tube" like quality.
While this was all great info, I needed something I could relate to. So I told Doug that I really like the M148 sound, and could he use that as a benchmark to inform the differences in sound between the concert mod and the warm mod. Doug explained that using that benchmark, the Warm Mod is like the M148 and the Concert Mod is like the M248 in terms of tone. Based on that and the fact that I run AKGs, that allowed me to make the obvious call on the Warm mod. Schoeps users would then benefit more from the Concert Mod, with it being more like the M248.
Really looking forward to putting this unit through it's paces and seeing what it can handle.
