greetings all. taped the Virginia Coalition and Edwin McCain last nite at the Belly Up in Solana Beach, CA. my home taping venue that i know so well. ran the standard senn k3u/me40 (supercard) + akg 460/ck61 combo > shure fp33 > 671. used line out on the shure and the rca line in on the 671. ran the limiter on the shure but forgot to run the limiter on the 671 and got bit hard. i had 0db peaks here and there and generally ran the show at -3db as recorded by the peak hold, but still have crackles where dynamics crushed the input of the 671 (or so i believe). ran my M1 as a backup off the tape out of the shure and had -2db levels on it all night - sounds fine, just wish i had started it on time and not let the batteries die near the end of edwin's set.
loading the show into cooledit pro to look at the waveforms... my gut feeling is that the 671 does not report as accurately/quickly as is ness to trust it for absolute accuracy on the meters. the shure has a very wide dynamic range before clipping and the unit was never run that hard last nite to account for the crackles that seem to follow snare hits and the like - did have to run one of my old backup mic bodies, but am pretty sure that was not the cause. i will be sending all bodies to dwight over at sennheiser shortly as one body did quit just prior to dickey betts. anyway, having owned these mics for more than a few years i feel that 671 owners better run the internal limiter unil they get a real feel for the metering, i am going to write D&M and express some opinions and see what comes back. i'll post it. i also ran a 4G scandisk CF card as i have sworn off microdrives for the moment, altho i think i my be going thru some rechargeable hell with the X1 batteries am testing out - i think the NoMemPro's seem to be the absolute most reliable batch to batch - i have 40 of the X1's and can't yet get consistant run times - best has been 9hrs in the bag, worst has been 2.5 in the bag.
neil out