[Peter A. Stoll[_2_]]

Matt wrote in news:cdeda384-bd31-4311-89e7-
:

Since you won't reveal the application, are we to
assume that it must be portable and self-powered?

If you want to continue to play a game of 20-questions,
your responses will be limited to those who also wish
to play.

My apologies. The application is a set of lectures over a three day
period that I will be unable to attend, so I want to leave the
recorder going in my absence.

Kind Regards,

Matt

Only three days? Ah, in that case my answer is overtaken by events. But
just in case someone reads this who wants longer:

With recent firmware release, the Sound Devices 7-series recorders
optionally record in mp3 format again. Several data rate options are
provided, from 32 to 320 kbyte/sec.

As the base hard drive in the hard-drive equipped models is 40 Gigabytes,
you could record for well over a week at the lowest mp3 bitrate. As you
can replace the as-shipped hard drive with a standard 2.5 inch PATA drive
as found in many laptops (no longer limited to something like 132 G in
current firmware), the medium capacity alone will support well over a
month.

If you can plug in the wall, and trust the power company not to have
outages longer than a few hours, that is it. However, the biggest
battery that will fit is only good for something like 8-ish hours, so if
being free of power is a requirement (as appeared likely in the original
post), then one would want to make up a power source. Just stack enough
of your favorite batteries to get 12V DC. The hardest part would be
procuring the connector, and that is readily available. I suspect that a
single charged car battery, plus wire and connector, would do the trick
for a fair number of days. Need more days: parallel more car batteries.

With the refined definition of your application, this solution seems
grossly over-priced (the cheapest 7-series is over $2000) and over-
capable (much better sound quality, and much longer recording time than
you need)

I just enter it as a pretty competitive entrant in the original posed
longest mp3 recording time question in the somewhat portable class,
though in the unlimited class it clearly loses the duration crown to an
ordinary PC with a 750G hard drive.