Mackie HDR issues.

[Charles Tomaras]

Just returned from a gig recording 13 bands in 11 hours for a DVD project to a
Mackie HDR. The HDR fell out of record all by itself 4 times during the gig.
Just sitting there tracking and all of a sudden the meters go silent and the red
record light goes out but the play button remains lit. Put it back in record and
it was fine till the next time it happened. No adverse heat situations, internal
sync, external TC and both sync and TC lights remained solid when it kicked out
of record. My recollection is that the problem happened on larger bands where I
was recording the full 24 tracks at 24/96 but I'm not sure as it was a
relentless 18 hour day that is kind of a blur in my mind. The truck recording on
the other stage at this same festival had their Mackie HDR lock up completely
during one of their bands. I've had very little experience with these machines,
they seem very unreliable. Any thoughts on this or suggestions to prevent this
from happening in the future?

Charles Tomaras
Seattle, WA

[Mike Rivers]

In article > writes:

> Just returned from a gig recording 13 bands in 11 hours for a DVD project to a
> Mackie HDR. The HDR fell out of record all by itself 4 times during the gig.
> Just sitting there tracking and all of a sudden the meters go silent and the
> red
> record light goes out but the play button remains lit.

This sounds like a problem with noisy AC power. It's sometimes a
problem with remote recording setups. A UPS next time might help.

I've recorded all day festival sessions with mine, but stopping to
open a new project for each band (rarely longer than an hour per
project), and never with all 24 tracks at the same time, so I can't
say that mine has never done the same thing. However, when testing the
new BIOS ROM for the HDR, I recorded 24 tracks continually for 4 hours
with no break, and did it again, and again, and again over the period
of about a week, with no lockups. I have a UPS ahead of my HDR24/96.




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[MH]

I've had the same thing recording live gigs for the BBC - we find the best
thing is to put the thing into record, give it a sniff of timecode, let it
sycnc up, then remove the timecode, as it seems to be dirty/glitching
timecode (ours generated from a GPS time signal which resyncs every 5 hours)
that causes it to drop out of record - if you take it out of timecode chase
it freeruns from that point, and over an average gig recording won't drift
out noticeably.

We've had no problems since doing this.

Martyn
"Mike Rivers" > wrote in message
news:znr1069075801k@trad...
>
> In article >
writes:
>
> > Just returned from a gig recording 13 bands in 11 hours for a DVD
project to a
> > Mackie HDR. The HDR fell out of record all by itself 4 times during the
gig.
> > Just sitting there tracking and all of a sudden the meters go silent and
the
> > red
> > record light goes out but the play button remains lit.
>
> This sounds like a problem with noisy AC power. It's sometimes a
> problem with remote recording setups. A UPS next time might help.
>
> I've recorded all day festival sessions with mine, but stopping to
> open a new project for each band (rarely longer than an hour per
> project), and never with all 24 tracks at the same time, so I can't
> say that mine has never done the same thing. However, when testing the
> new BIOS ROM for the HDR, I recorded 24 tracks continually for 4 hours
> with no break, and did it again, and again, and again over the period
> of about a week, with no lockups. I have a UPS ahead of my HDR24/96.
>
>
>
>
> --
> I'm really Mike Rivers - )
> However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
> lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
> you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
> and reach me here: double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

[Mike Rivers]

In article > writes:

> I've had the same thing recording live gigs for the BBC - we find the best
> thing is to put the thing into record, give it a sniff of timecode, let it
> sycnc up, then remove the timecode, as it seems to be dirty/glitching
> timecode (ours generated from a GPS time signal which resyncs every 5 hours)
> that causes it to drop out of record

If you're in Time Code Chase, that's a different bucket of worms. It
doesn't really chase, it monitors the incoming time code and compares
that with the HDR time code. If they get too far apart, it drops out
of Record. So if your time code source is known to glitch, you're
better off just using it to start at the right point, and then take it
out of chase mode. HDR's Time Code Chase is really "Time Code Start"
combined with "quit before you too far out of sync."

If you actually need to remain in sync with time code, you need a
device that generates word clock or black burst from the time code,
and use that as the HDR's clock source.



--
I'm really Mike Rivers - )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me here: double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo