well i took my 671 to Dickey Betts at the Coach house last sunday. testing at home showed 5 hours of playback with a 4G microdrive and the display off, 3.5 with the display on - i am using 2400mah nimh's. the numbers were way short of what marantz claims in the manual. anyway, i figured to be safe at dickey - OOOPS. deck ran out of battery at the 2.5 hr mark and i was downstairs grabbing a brew. it was in my bag where my testing was on the table - you wouldn't think it would matter but repeated testing at home showed the same kind of performance... got a 4G CF card and that runs 8hrs+ with the display on before the battery quits - that is more like it!
i also have this skip in one section of the show during playback... the time counts out fine, but it is like in the old days when a record skipped... thinking this is related to using a microdrive. the microdrive tested well for write speed with the 671 internal test and IBM rates the drive for sustained write speeds up to 7MB/sec, so i figured that a 24/48k recording should be well in the safe zone - looks like i was wrong. BTW i am using a Scandisk 4G CF card. i also hjad the recorder in verify mode - that may well account for the short run time - have to test further. also note that in 24bit mode there is no RAW - read after write - ie no 3 head function...
the recording came out ok, i used a shure fp33 as a pre with 2 senn k3u/me40 and one akg 460/ck63. i also used the mic in on the 671 and it seems like there are times you can hear some hiss... will have to look more carefully into that end of the recording, altho my plan is to use the line in.
i did not use the limiter, got some OVR's on the display but never saw them happen. can't really hear them either, so we will have to see how the limiter as well as the metering really works.
so far, i think the unit is pretty cool. i do think that it is best to run the CF cards tho. i really hate having to carry SLA batteries to run the unit long enuff to get a complete show using the microdrives and i am pretty sure that i would not have any "skips" were i running the CF card.
all for now
neil