So, here are a couple of recent interesting experiences with the 660. Sorry for such a long post.
Taping with the internal batteries again (more on that later) at an outdoor festival with music (as opposed to a music festival) where the sound was pretty mild.
I left off the -20db pad and amazingly found no ticking.
I got a full day of great pulls on the internal batteries with the input dial at either 10 or 9 o'clock
and no pads or filters on the mics either. I was very happy.
Sill using the same Lexar 4.0g 60x card, by the way.
At one point after the music was over I'd disengaged the phantom in anticipation of breaking down when I heard something interesting and without thinking just powered up and hit record. Wow, really loud ticking in addition to the expected noise. I don't know what that means and it is certainly a useless 10 seconds of sound, but the presence of ticking in that situation seems like a clue for someone who knows more about electricity than I do. :-)
The reason I chose to run without the pad (in addition to the fact that it wasn't at all loud) was that a couple nights ago I'd been testing my new windscreens by recording my 4th floor veranda and found the ticking even when plugged in to the electric outlet which seemed to throw out my previous claim that the DC cured the ticking. The current at my apartment is a bit suspect compared to Tokuzo where I'd experienced the lack of ticking using the DC in.
This has nothing to do with the 660, but in addition to the ticking I was getting this really horrible electrical interference only when the mics were outside but with both DC power and with batteries. The sound would all but disappear when rotating the mic stand to a different angle and then shift to the left channel if I turned far enough. The sound was never as loud in the left channel, however. When I bring the mics inside the apartment the noise is almost gone, well, enough gone that I think I'd never noticed it before at least....
but I digress...
Then, just for kicks (and to do a simulation for the festival),
I took off the -20db pad with the batteries in and there was no ticking.(!?) :-)
Which brings me to the battery issue.
I've been searching round all the usual geek stores for a battery box that will give me 5V and can't find anything. I tried searching at
http://www.soundhouse.co.jp/ , but couldn't come up with anything... I've since confirmed the Japanese terminology, better to try again... 6V, or 4.something or 1.5 or 12 is abundant, but everyone just shakes their head and apologises when I ask for 5.
Though the removal of the pad seemed to take away the ticking when using batteries I'd still like to get a battery box as a back-up. Anyone with more EE knowledge than me wanna talk me out of trying to import (actually they probably won't ship it to Japan anyway) one of the battery boxes linked above (or on previous pages)?
Anyway, still enjoying the stock 660 and trying to get as much out of it as I can.
I got a mixer for the massively loud shows I occasionally tape.
Thank you for the Bussman recommendations, but a mixer is a solution that doesn't leave me without a recorder for an extended period of time and also gives me some flexibility to do sbd/fob matrices, so I went for that. It also doesn't effect anything else I do with the 660. I've saved the email address, though. :-)