On first listen the recording sounds incredible. 24 bit is definitely the way to go. However, I've already found 3 glitches. One sounds like a skip and the other 2 sound like short static bursts (0.2 seconds or so). I checked them out in goldwave. One of the glitches looks like the diginoise I sometimes see on DAT transfers with the wave sqared off. The other one that sounds like a click does not show high bursts in the wave editor. Could these be related to the microdrive and the sample rate? I'm tempted to grab a 4gb CF card before my next 2 shows which are this friday and saturday. Thoughts It was a great, great show.
A 4GB CF card would certainly be a good thing to have. (Sometimes microdrives seem to fail when a butterfly sneezes nearby, while regular CF cards (at least Sandisk) are likely to keep on working even after they've gone through the washing machine, or fallen a couple dozen feet onto a hard surface. (But the price and capacity of microdrives sure makes them tempting to have provided that you don't drop things too often...
))
Though you might first try formatting the microdrive with 64K clusters (under Windows 2k/XP, right-click on My Computer -> Manage -> Disk Management - and the format command gives you the option to select the 'Allocation unit size'; or just use the format command from the Command Prompt). (This should reduce the amount of seeking that the heads have to do while the drive's being used.)
You could also try using 24/48 instead of 24/96 (which cuts down the amount of data that's being written to the microdrive - maybe enough so that you wouldn't get any more glitches), but that's not as ideal as having it work flawlessly at 24/96...
Also, it might be interesting to see if the 5GB Segate ST1 microdrive works any better than the Hitachi microdrives (as the Segate has a 2MB cache vs the Hitachi's 128KB, and it has higher sustained read/write transfer rates). (Though what I've read at on the forums at dpreview.com is that it drains camera batteries a lot faster than the Hitachi drives do.)
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/print/seagate-st1-5gb.htmlhttp://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/print/hitachi-microdrive.html