Hey...

Just received the Marantz PMD660 today. This has got to be one of the
first few units out there, so I'm offering my opinions on it if anyone's
interested. Unfortunately haven't formed many opinions yet as it got a
test drive in the kitchen and not in a real situation. This weekend
(3/4/05) I'll be recording a drum and bugle corps (www.corpsvets.org)
with a Shure VP88.

Only thing I can tell so far is that it's a bit noisier than I'd hoped,
and the -20dB pad really jacks up the noise. Funny how a pad makes
things even noisier. I'll need all the pad I can get with drum corps
since it's a loud source. Without pad, clipping was at -6dB so I'm
assuming the mic is pretty hot although this seems to be an unusual
place to clip and you wonder what kind of gain staging goes on
internally. I suppose a 6dB pad in the cables without the 20dB pad in
the recorder would probably be perfect. With pad I could scream
directly into mic and still had clean signal upon reviewing the
waveforms.

Menus are easy to use the options are plentiful. 16 bits 44.1kHz is
fine for me and that means approx 90 mins on a 1 GB compact flash. USB
works great and I'm sure popping the flash into computer would be a
darned fast transfer.

Eric
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