Topic: Sony MZ-NH900, Line In "auto level"

[tibbsa]

Good evening,

I've recorded a few quieter, acoustic shows in the past 2 months, and those have turned out relatively well.  We were at a very loud bar concert the other night, though, and that was an entirely different story.

I was running my omni mics through a pre-amp/battery box to the recorder, line-in.  (All of this is somewhat out of the ordinary brand-wise, but that's not important.)  I suspect that the poor little omni mics were blown out of the water by the high sound level, at least on the bass end, even WITH the battery box, and it certainly didn't do much for the quality of the results.  But...

When the band really got going, I noticed that I was peaking awful close to the 'over' mark, with the recorder at 18/30.  I dropped this to 14/30, thinking this would solve the problem.  It did, but on playback, right before I dropped the levels, there was a trumpet that sounded fine.  When I attenuated down, that trumpet ended up being very raspy and distorted. 

So, two questions come to mind:

• 1. Would attenuating the signal at the recorder (line-in) possibly introduce distortion like that?  I could have run the pre-amp at low gain to keep the recorder at around 20/30 I'm sure, but didn't know about this problem until I got it home.
• 2. The MZ-NH900 allows you to change to manual recording levels for both mic and line-in.  Now, as I understand it, the AGC logic only applies to mic-in.  What, then, does the "automatic" level function for line-in recordings do?  Would this be suitable when you're already running through a pre-amp, or would it introduce the same "pumping" effect as the mic AGC on quieter shows?

I haven't re-tested this in front of a really loud stere or anything, and figuired I'd ask the experts before potentially wasting my time at the effort...

edit: hmmm, the (list) / (/list) attempt didn't work?  Added list numbers...

- Anthony