Encountered a weird issue with my R-26 last night, which ended up fine, but I'm curious what I saw.
I had mics running into the XLR ins, everything normal there. Into the 1/8" I had an SBD feed from the 2trk 1/4" line outs of an Allen & Heath board. I had the input sens set to LOW. According to the manual, p. 105, the maximum input when set to low is +4dBu, which I believe is the same as pro line level.
In addition, I had -12dB attenuators in the chain, since I wasn't that familiar with how low the input sensitivity of the R-26 could be.
My levels came out fine, but I noticed that the very last light at the very end of the meter for the PIP input would turn from white to black at times when the vox got loud. I assumed this was is the clip light, although the R-26 has a red "PEAK" light which I'm not sure applies to the plug in power input. It did not light. The attenuators were working fine (I tried removing one during the opening band, and indeed, my levels jumped 12dB and the light stayed on longer). I should also note that the indicators that show the most recent peak level never hit zero; they hung around -9dB at highest even during those vocal "peaks".
I asked the engineer if he could turn the output down, but he could not. He told me after the first set that he was ramming the levels pretty hard on the vocals because all of these bands had really noisy guitar amps. He said his own levels were super hot on the board.
I had no idea what else I could do, so I just engaged the limiter on the PIP input (incidentally, a nice feature, since I think the -44 only lets you "Group" the limiter by channel but not engage for one group and not for another) and let it go.
The waveforms on the resulting recording are extremely ugly looking-- like stalactites, with deep downward peaks that aren't matched by corresponding upward peaks. However, I do not hear distortion and they sound "fine" (i.e., like small venue board feeds with mostly vocals and some percussion).
I am wondering if what I'm seeing is a result of something that the engineer did, having to do with the venue's gates and compressors. I don't know enough about that stuff to speak authoritatively, but the waveform would seem to suggest that something like that was going on.
The only other mystery is why the end of the level meter behaved like that. It continued to do it even after I engaged the limiter, so I'm not entirely sure what was going on.
Thoughts?