This one's ready to be sorted, but wanted to let everyone know about it in case they experience similar symptoms. The symptoms I experienced with my Oade ACM HD-P2:
- Slow firewire connectivity to PC (3-7 minutes just to connect)
- Slow navigation once connected (5sec - 3min just to navigate to a directory)
- Slow transferring once initiated (didn't measure, but painfully slow)
I benchmarked all of the above against my properly firewire-connecting stock HD-P2, which connected and navigated nearly instantenously and had much faster transfer speeds. (FWIW, I also picked up a Lexar card reader and it's
blazing fast relative to even the properly functioning stock P2.)
Anyway, after several weeks of email and phone calls back and forth with Tascam support (what a tediously slow process...hmph...thought they'd provide swifter customer service), they finally emailed me saying it's a known problem with some HD-P2s (no specific serial # range given, so it maybe a random problem instead of a specific production run). They gave me the address to which I should send the unit for service. Of course, it's an Oade ACM mod, so it's not quite that simple. I've contacted Doug and he's going to work with the Tascam folks to figure out what needs fixing (which will probably take another couple weeks...apparently he's encountered similar response times from Tascam support) and likely fix it himself, or arrange for another resolution.
I'm confident it will all work out in the end, and in the meantime don't mind that it transfers slowly since I love my little Lexar card reader. :)