I recorded a jazz show the other night - first time out with my new Edirol R-09HR. I used Coresound stealthy cardiods w/ a battery box.
Shame on me for not fully testing the rig before I went out. I plugged everything in, and did a "testing....1, 2, 3" voice test directly into the mics and everything seemed to work fine.
However, when I got to the show, I didn't seem to get much of a signal when I plugged the mics into the line-in jack. If I cranked the input up all the way, I got a little bit of movement on the meter (very little). So I went with mic-in and at 50, I got what looked like a nice signal (typically hitting somewhere around halfway across the meter). I recorded the whole show this way. FYI: the volume of the concert itself was fairly loud for a jazz show.
When I got home and downloaded the audio, I found the volume was really low. I had to jack it up 14-15 dBs to get it to where it was audible at a decent level. Fortunately, since it was a jazz concert, even though I really cranked up the volume, the recording didn't suffer from this and sounds quite nice.
Any ideas on why line-in didn't work? And if I have to go with mic-in, it looks like I need to seriously crank up the input. Maybe up around 70. That seems really high though.
I'm still pretty much a newbie at audio recording though - so who knows?