"Mike Rivers" wrote in message
news:znr1122377358k@trad
In article
writes:

I'll bet it's not a digitally controlled analog
attenuator.

I'm hoping that you'll lose that bet, Mike.

I seem to recall that about six months ago TI announced a
new low-power-supply-voltage (+/-5) high-performance mic
preamp chip with a built-in digitally-controlled analog
attenuator. Seems like the time might be right for that
part to start showing up all over the place.

That's the one that Mackie is using in their mic/line I/O
card for their dxb console. I don't know if it's cheap
enough to use in a recorder like the M-Audio yet though.

Yea, its not a cheap chip - about $10 in production
quantities. But, it's not like the MXB is cheap or comes
with a lot of mic preamps.

I guess we'll wait and see.

Agreed.

Still, the cost of recording media is what will keep me
away. I'd be happy to put up with an extra 1/4" thickness
in exchange for an internal disk drive, but I suspect
that the market dictates pocket-sized as a design
criteria.

I sort of homed in the microdrive option which is a disk
drive option.

Mike, I also don't share your need for gobs of in-device
storage, probably because I might be a lot more comfortable
with offloading stuff from the portable via USB.