Topic: Tascam DR-70D 4-channel audio recorder (Part 4)

[flipp]

Quoting in entirety in case of future edits:

ANY PRO WOULD LAUGH AT YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE, IF IT WENT VIRAL THAT YOU SAID THIS!!!!

...

  Any pro would laugh at your preparation if you told them "I'm using an old card that I had lying around that I think will work in this higher channel count recorder".
If there's a card that you really think is fast enough that TASCAM hasn't tested yet, send an email to Custser@teac.com requesting it be tested.    If we see a bunch of common requests, that makes it real easy to pick one up and put it into the schedule.    Complaining that cards that are not on the list are causing problems can only get one reply, why aren't you using cards on the list?

Um, because if I had not read your response today, I would have been trying to search Japanese-language websites for Japanese-packaged SanDisk cards!?!?! *!

Please test these cards, I want to be sure that they all work in my recorder.

Lexar Professional, LSD32GCRBNA600BN, 32GB, CL10, UHS-1, SDHC I, 90 MB/s
ADATA Premier, ASDH16GUICL10-R, 16GB, CL10, UHS-1, SDHC I,  50 MB/s
SanDisk Ultra, SDSDUN-016G-G46, 16GB, CL10, UHS-1 SDHC I, 40 MB/s
Sony  SF-32UY2, SF32UY2/TQ, 32GB, CL10, UHS-1 SDHC I, 70 MB/s
SanDisk Extreme, SDSDXN-032-G46, 32GB, CL10, UHS-3, SDHC I, 60MB/s
SanDisk Ultra, SDSDQUA-016G-U46A, 16GB, CL10, MicroSDHC I, 30MB/s
Kingston SDC4/8GB, 8GB, CL4, MicroSDHC, 4MB/s
Transcend TS8GSDHC6, 8GB, CL6, SDHC,
Transcend TS8GSDHC10, 10GB, CL10, SDHC

Also, how about listing some USA cards on your website, not just the Japan versions?

Thank you,

a DR-70D owner

from http://tascam.com/product/dr-70d/specifications/
Recording media   SD card(64MB to 2GB), SDHC card(4GB to 32GB), SDXC card(48GB to 128GB)

(Inline image 1)

At some point this will probably be forwarded to the Attornies General of California, and of the United States Of America, as well as the Better Business Bureau, Fraud.org, The Federal Trade Commission, my representatives in US Congress, the California State Legislature, B & H Photo from whom I purchased the DR-70D, and my own lawyer.

I hope you can find me a solution which makes all of that unnecessary. Otherwise, you may wish to consider the ramifications of a class action lawsuit upon your business!

Thanks for taking the time to address my concerns.

Sincerely,
A First-Time Tascam Customer

also quoting a much calmer reply

Can anyone confirm that they've had problems with one of the cards on the approved list?

If not, 32gigs is over 7 hours for 4 channels at 24/96. That's more than enough for me.

Also, I understand that people are angry, but I think we need a little perspective:

1. It's a $200 deck. Made for camera audio. We're assuming that it will be competition for a 744. That's crazy.

2. Threatening the tascam rep with a class action lawsuit is a sure way to get him to disappear.

3. It's ok to be frustrated. By be nice!

[voltronic]

Can anyone confirm that they've had problems with one of the cards on the approved list?

If not, 32gigs is over 7 hours for 4 channels at 24/96. That's more than enough for me.

Also, I understand that people are angry, but I think we need a little perspective:

1. It's a $200 deck. Made for camera audio. We're assuming that it will be competition for a 744. That's crazy.

2. Threatening the tascam rep with a class action lawsuit is a sure way to get him to disappear.

3. It's ok to be frustrated. By be nice!

 

Agreed 100%.  Maintain low tones!

[aaronji]

I don't know much about this, but this explanation seems unlikely to me.  First of all, there is a specification for SD cards that Tascam's engineers should be taking into consideration; the device should be designed to work with any card that lives up to that specification.  Moreover, the host device can query the card's performance, so a well-designed device would tell you, beforehand, that the card had insufficient speed.  Four channel, 24 bit, 96 kHz audio puts out ~ 1.1 MB/s and the file allocation table maps how the chunks of data will be reassembled afterwards, so (after formatting in the host) the card should be essentially agnostic to the number of files (mind you, we're talking about the difference between 2 and 4, not 2 and 4 thousand) as long as it can write fast enough, which means anything class 2 or over.  I am sure there is some detail of this I don't know or understand, but class 4, certainly, should be easily able to handle this application.  Assuming the host device works correctly...

1. It's a $200 deck. Made for camera audio. We're assuming that it will be competition for a 744. That's crazy.

I don't think it is unreasonable to expect a device marketed as a four channel recorder, even an inexpensive one, to, uh, record four channels...

Personally, I think Tascam didn't do it's due diligence here.  Just my take, but it seems like they buy up anything they can and flood the market with a LOT of different models, most of them inexpensive.  How thorough do you the think the design and testing are?  By contrast, look at Sony or Marantz or Roland.  Unless I am miscounting, those companies have put out the same number of devices per decade as Tascam per year...

I had made up my mind to buy one of these, but not anymore.  It's not just the glitch, either, it's also the condescending response...

[stevetoney]

I'm trying to take a more pragmatic look at Tomuo's response right now.  Yes, I agree with the frustration people are expressing, except for the threat of class action lawsuit.  That's IMHO counter productive at this early stage in the game.  I'd suggest opening another thread or take it offsite if you need to talk lawsuits.  We need cooperation and answers in this thread to get to a solution, not threats.  And it's better to have Tascam on-board trying to solve the problems, if possible, than immediately alienating them with threats.

His response yesterday focused on card quality, so I did some research.  This link provided a nice response to explain a little better how cards work and how they can degrade.  Mind you, this doesn't explain why most decks work well with some cards and this one won't, but perhaps it's a start to helping us diagnose how best to deal with this issue, especially if the most we get from Tascam is to 'try a better card'.

http://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/40489/what-causes-an-sd-card-to-go-corrupt

[ts]

I've been using the PNY 128gb. I saw that it was on Voltronics "good list" and figured I'd try it for the Peach Fest. Purchased new from B&H. I ran 4 channels into it for 3 days straight, 8 -10 hours per day with no issues. Formatted in the deck. No firmware updates. The 70D has whatever it came with for firmware. Also used lithium internals. Have also ran 4 channels on at least two other occasions with Rav Power. Always 24/48. Now if I can get my M10 to perform this flawlessly I'd be a happy camper.

[vwmule]

I've had no problems with mine, either. Worked like a champ (two channels, 32 gig card) at Lockn'.

Add: I never upgraded firmware.

[2manyrocks]

I've read every post in this thread from the beginning.  It is only recently that there have been any complaints about the cards which makes me wonder if the problems are related to firmware updates or using worn out or lesser quality cards?  I have mainly used sandisk 16g or Sony 32g cards bought from major retailers with no problems. 

Tascam sort of set itself up for question by advertising the product works with large capacity cards, but then none over 32g are on the approved list yet.  Any good salesman could see how that could get customers to start asking questions.  The tascam rep doesn't run tascam, and don't bereate him for things out of his control.

Overall, the 70d thread took on the status of the favorite child until this card thing came up.  Other than the f8 thread, the 70d has been the most discussed recorder here for months on end. 

[Ronmac]

I used a DR70D on a low budget film shoot for 8 days (16 hours plus per day), mostly on single channel boom, with zero issues. I started experiencing issues after doing firmware upgrade. This could be coincidence....

Thinking it was a hardware failure, I purchased a second unit, upgrading firmware without thinking that may have been an issue. You guessed it, second unit is experiencing same issue.

Hoping TASCAM can resolve this issue quickly. I love everything about this unit....

[morst]

1 - I assume no such thing - I simply assumed that a unit specified to work on cards up to 128GB would actually do so in the real world. I am not demanding 744 quality, merely requesting DR-70D quality! If that quality were advertised as glitchy and unlistenable, then I would not be complaining because I would not have purchased the unit.

2 - He's not solving my problem, so I'll have to look further. Tascam should know what's at the end of the line if they can't resolve this. Sending in someone to tell us that it's our fault, and that "any pro would laugh at us" is probably just going to make things worse.

3 - you can't make me be nice, but it's a good suggestion.

Can anyone confirm that they've had problems with one of the cards on the approved list?

If not, 32gigs is over 7 hours for 4 channels at 24/96. That's more than enough for me.

Also, I understand that people are angry, but I think we need a little perspective:

1. It's a $200 deck. Made for camera audio. We're assuming that it will be competition for a 744. That's crazy.

2. Threatening the tascam rep with a class action lawsuit is a sure way to get him to disappear.

3. It's ok to be frustrated. By be nice!

[johnmuge]

We're lucky to have Tomuo from Tascam on Taperssection to hear us out and try to help us thru this.  I have no problem using the cards they recommend as long as it records without issues.  When it works, I really like it.  I just want to have confidence that it's not going to muff up !!  We only have 1 chance to capture it live.

[morst]

We only have 1 chance to capture it live.

I've already lost two chances by referring to the Product Specifications. I hope that referring to the current list of 5 possible cards over 8 GB will enable me to make useful recordings on this machine.

[tomuo]

I agree that it's reasonable to expect some 128GB cards on the list of tested media, I'm working on that.
I wasn't aware that the list of tested media at the bottom of the spec page on our website was still showing the Japanese market product names.   We always keep the PDF version on the downloads page up-to-date, and that's the link we send to people when they ask about media.

What I do think we need to improve is how the DR-70D behaves when the card is not keeping up.  Recording a glitch without letting you know that it happened is the problem that started all this frustration - users are spending a lot of their time pre-qualifying cards that are not on the list.   Cards on the list have been extensively tested so we are sure glitches won't happen.
We added erase-format ability to the DR-70D in V1.11 so that if you have a card that started off good enough and slowed down, it can be returned to full speed.
Before an important recording, erase-format is a good step (tested good cards have been verified so that their worst-case performance is still good enough, that's the difference).

Note: Cards added to the tested list will always be cards that you can buy new now.

I'm still skeptical that V1.11 has new problems, I think it's just cards in use are aging and showing their true performance.   As we test more class 10 cards, we should start to see how they behave under the workload presented by the DR-70D.     I iterate again, audio recording 4 channels or more is completely different to the write data patterns the card manufacturers optimize for.   But if a card worked in the DR-680 but not in the DR-70D, that's a data point I would be interested in.

[morst]

As I was complaining on Twitter today, I noticed that TascamPro released an update for the DP-24, which fixes clicks and pops. In the user forum, Tascam was said to have tried to blame the SD cards repeatedly, though the problem was solved in July 2015 with a firmware update.

http://www.tascamforums.com/threads/dp-24-pops-and-clicks.2349/

I agree that it's reasonable to expect some 128GB cards on the list of tested media, I'm working on that.
I wasn't aware that the list of tested media at the bottom of the spec page on our website was still showing the Japanese market product names.   We always keep the PDF version on the downloads page up-to-date, and that's the link we send to people when they ask about media.

What I do think we need to improve is how the DR-70D behaves when the card is not keeping up.  Recording a glitch without letting you know that it happened is the problem that started all this frustration - users are spending a lot of their time pre-qualifying cards that are not on the list.   Cards on the list have been extensively tested so we are sure glitches won't happen.
We added erase-format ability to the DR-70D in V1.11 so that if you have a card that started off good enough and slowed down, it can be returned to full speed.
Before an important recording, erase-format is a good step (tested good cards have been verified so that their worst-case performance is still good enough, that's the difference).

Note: Cards added to the tested list will always be cards that you can buy new now.

I'm still skeptical that V1.11 has new problems, I think it's just cards in use are aging and showing their true performance.   As we test more class 10 cards, we should start to see how they behave under the workload presented by the DR-70D.     I iterate again, audio recording 4 channels or more is completely different to the write data patterns the card manufacturers optimize for.   But if a card worked in the DR-680 but not in the DR-70D, that's a data point I would be interested in.

[morst]

I'm still skeptical that V1.11 has new problems, I think it's just cards in use are aging and showing their true performance.   As we test more class 10 cards, we should start to see how they behave under the workload presented by the DR-70D.     I iterate again, audio recording 4 channels or more is completely different to the write data patterns the card manufacturers optimize for.   But if a card worked in the DR-680 but not in the DR-70D, that's a data point I would be interested in.

How about a card that works in Tascam's DP-24, of which there are DOZENS listed as working? 
http://tascam-ca.com/product/dp-24/specifications/

Or is 24-channels a completely different data pattern than 4? 

[jackaroe]

Had a couple of issues running the 70d lastnight. First, I was running on USB power when i powered the deck on. Started up fine, about 5 minutes or so into the show I noticed the deck had turned off and not switched over to the internal AA power for some reason. After turning it back on it wouldnt run on USB power and only the internal power. Corrected this at set break and it ran fine on USB power for the 2nd set. Shows over and I stop the recording (4 channels on external pre amps), I went to turn the unit off and I got the "Cant Save Data" message, figured it wouldnt save the files but they are still there. The unit did reset the track count back to zero for some reason so I have a 22, then a 1 and 2...not sure whats going on here but this makes 2 out of 4 times ive run this deck now ive encountered problems...

I was using a Sandisk 64gb Ultra card which hasnt given me problems, but this doesnt seem to be card related...

I had the same issue at lockn on friday. For three sets my unit reverted to battery power from usb. Each time I reset and the unit continued to revert to battery power. I switched to a different  external battery source and the unit performed flawlessly the rest of the weekend. However my dr-40 ran for two days on the same battery that the dr-70 was having issues with.