Hi all, looking for some shared experience...
I got my Senn's on Wed. (8040 STs), and went out last night to a local bar to tape a friend's band (Emergency Service, they were surprisingly good). Was recording straight into my MR-1000 (Busman mod). The "sound guy" (I think he was a bouncer who knew how to find the on switch on the board...) had the sound waaaayy to high and bassy. The space was pretty small, underground, and very boomy. In the small space, it was borderline painful making me wish I'd brought my earplugs, one of the loudest situations I've been in recently. So there's the setup.
During the show, I checked the sound and even though the meters were safely between -12 and -6, I heard the tell-tale crackling of something being overloaded. When I got home and looked at the waveform in Reaper, sure enough "something" had clipped. Since the 8040's are rated 142 db SPL, and there wasn't blood coming out of our ears at the show, I'm guessing it wasn't the mics <grin>
My initial guess is I overloaded the preamp in the MR1000. Does anyone have any idea how hot the signal is coming out of the 8040's? Anyone else have problems with the preamp stage? My other guess is since the "sound guy" had the bass cranked up waay to far (our drinks were literally vibrating across the table!) all that high energy low bass acoustic energy was being efficiently converted by the mics into electrical energy that was blasting away at my preamp.
My next step is to either a) run them through some barrel attenuators, either -20db or -10db, or b) run them through my Shure FP24 / MixPre, but wanted to sound out my thoughts with those with experience. I saw someone had a signature that they were running the 8040's into an MR1000,but couldn't find them to compare notes. I know many run them through V3's and 7XX's, which can tolerate some very hot signals, so I'm hoping to find out how much gain you're using to get a sense of how hot these mics run.
All ideas greatly appreciated!
Mike