Meanwhile, I used mine for real at a string quartet recital this afternoon - with the Sennheiser MKH series MS pair - not stealth or anything, it's an official recording for a classical music FM radio station - and I'm extremely pleased with the outcome. Only problem was that the venue suffered from distant traffic rumble, so it won't serve as an illustration of how good the preamps seem to be. Well, they sure record low frequency rumble accurately...
It only occurred to me last night how well the thing is physically designed. No controls or whatever touch the surface if you put it down on its sides, or upside down (helped in that case by the bumps of the internal mics). And the wedge-shaped side cheeks help protect the front knobs. There's almost no reasonable angle at which the display can't be seen. I found the tiny meters perfectly usable today - peaked to -2dB (I like it hot!). I used my Tevion battery pack, which with only two channels of phantom barely lost any charge in recording the rehearsal and the 90 minute concert. In any event I had rechargeables in the R-44 battery bay as well. Headphone output seems perfectly sufficient - I was sitting at the back of the hall and didn't need to drive the cans more than the half way point in order to hear against the natural sound.
So many cool little touches - for instance, drop a marker during recording, think "oops, I didn't need one there" and press "clear" and the marker is deleted on the fly. The facility to have preset auto filenames is handy to - before the gig I set up names for rehearsal, part1, and part2, and then you just pick the one you want without having to 'type' them in again.
My only gripe remains the monitoring issue. It's a nuisance to have to carry and connect up a monitor mixer for four-channel work.
