dougdunderdale

A reply from Gordon Moore at Lectrosonics on another forum: HI everyone - this IS a recent development not spotted by the beta testers or us - it does manifest only with transmitters close. It has NOT shown up in every unit. It should not take 3-12 months as stated in the original post but in all honesty we can't be sure until it truly is beaten. Switching your transmitter to a lower power levels can also eliminate the problem. We DO think we have found the solution in the engineering department and a new board layout has been already completed and sent out for PCB (which take a couple of weeks to come back in). We'll stuff them as soon as they arrive and test to see if the design change is effective. As soon as we confirm, we will , naturally, take care of ANYONE who is experiencing this issue.

I was mostly thinking of the difficulties they’ve had getting the SRCs up to speed.

I’m cross-posting this to a few forums so I apologize if you see it more than once. As part of my transition plan for moving to FCC-safe frequencies, I bought a new Lectro SRC and a pair of SMVs in Block 941 back in mid-June. I had scanned the forums and talked with dealers and the Block 941 wirelesses seemed to be working out fine. Due to a busy work schedule and a vacation break, I was only able to do a quick check of the set and everything seemed fine. Mostly I was blown away by a totally unoccupied frequency block. I used the set as a camera hop for a couple of days and everything seemed good but in retrospect I realized that all of my listening tests had happened in loud environments or using an earbud coming out of the camera’s headphone jack. Anyway, after vacation I finally sat down and listened to the set and I heard a strange noise on the channel 2 output of the SRC - an ascending sine wave kind of sound that happened in ~5 second intervals. With everything on the TX and RX and recorder set at something approximating normal, the noise was VERY obvious. I 1st noticed it when I had a mic plugged in but it was even more noticeable without a mic. So I scanned the usual forums and nobody else was talking about it. So I tried to isolate the problem. I won’t go into everything I tried but to summarize, the noise was on the channel 2 output of the SR. I could lessen the noise if I moved the TX about 15’ away from the SRC but it could come back by just moving a few inches any direction. I called my friends at Gotham, Sound Devices and Lectro and nobody had heard about anything like this. If you want to hear a sample of the sound, I've uploaded it below. Lectro SRC noise - Dunderdale.wav So I called Lectro support and described the problem and all of the things I tried to isolate the noise. They didn’t have much to suggest so they overnighted me a replacement SRC. It sounded the same. So they tried listening to a couple of Block 941 SRCs they had on the shelf and they had the same problem. So it’s a thing. Lectro has been trying to understand why this is happening. They suggested that I lower the TX output to 50mW and keep the TX at least 10’ away from the SRC. In my tests, I had to be at least 15’ away at 50mW but I work on docs and this is not a workable solution. Lectro doesn’t have any idea how long this will take to identify and fix but given how long it’s taken them to identify and solve similar problems recently, it’s probably somewhere in the 3-12 month range. Maybe they’ve learned something more in the last few days and they can give us a better estimate. They seemed pretty convinced that this was a problem with all of the Block 941 SRCs that they had in house, but it is puzzling that nobody else has noticed the issue. If anybody has one of these sets and they do not have the problem, that would be useful to know. So I’m sending my SRC and SMV’s back and looking for a new solution. I have been a lifelong Lectro user and my whole wireless ecosystem is built around Lectros, but to be honest, I’m a little spooked by some of the quality issues we’ve been seeing over the past year or two. And it doesn’t help that Lectro seems averse to admitting to the quality issues or warning people that there are problems with devices that are still being sold. Sorry for the long post. I’m uncomfortable writing this b/c I’ve depended so deeply on Lectro gear. But if I had seen a post like this before mid-June, my life would have been way easier.

Hi Phil! Apparently I don't get invited to the shoots with the DIT. But I can dream...

I'm working a lot with Alexa Minis these days and have tried using my UWP to feed my audio into the camera. Using the headphone out and cranking everything (transmitter, receiver and camera) to the max, I get only one bar on the camera meter. Since there is no ability to monitor the audio on the camera, it's hard to know if I'm actually getting my audio or just a massively amplified noise floor. If there is anybody who is successfully using the UWP as a camera hop into the Mini, can you help me with this? Also, the headphone out from the UWP is much noisier than the Line out, which is only vaguely annoying b/c the camera hop is just a reference track.

Thanks for the search advice. It's been a persistent frustration.

Thanks! I searched "naked and afraid" and nothing came up.

Anybody know the details for gear on the reality series, Naked & Afraid? It's notable because the 2 individuals in each show are naked for 21 days while they try to survive in various difficult environments. Clearly, each individual wears a necklace that has a mic in it but are they transmitting or just carrying recorders. They usually carry an over-the-shoulder bag which is where the recorder/transmitter lives. The occasional shots of the camera crew show a sound person carrying a full-size rig. The subjects spend most of the time very wet/muddy/sweaty/dirty.

Nice app, but almost unusable for me b/c of the wacky formatting of the pdf report. Why can't you make the "Filename" column just a little wider so that the whole filename ( maybe 12-14 characters) can fit on one line? I thought I was doing something wrong with my formatting until I saw the sample reports and they are just as hard to read. Like the number on the far left that numbers each take is positioned in the middle of the take entry (next to the "av"?) Post thought something had gotten garbled in the email process. Is there some way for me to adjust the column widths? I would love to have an easier way to do reports on my iOS device, but for now, I'm sticking w/ my excel spreadsheet in Docs To Go.

I have a couple of jobs coming up where I'm going to need to record quite a few channels of audio (more than 4, hopefully 16 or less). One job is with a lot of people talking and I'll be using a couple of Dugan Model-E's (which requires insert points). The other will be a doc about a modern composer and will include some live music recording. I own a Presonus StudioLive 16.4.2 mixer, which I've been very happy with, and I've been using the firewire out from that to record multitrack audio. But up till now, I haven't needed to worry about maintaining sync w/ video cameras over long takes. I know the StudioLive's wordclock is not especially accurate (altho I haven't yet measured what sort of drift I would get over a couple of hours.) So I have 2 questions. First, What do I need to do to have accurate sync (on the audio side) between the audio and the video cameras? Is it best to get a couple of audio interfaces to go between the StudioLive 16.4.2 and my MacBook Pro or is there some way to make the firewire feed from the 16.4.2 more accurate (there's no Wordclock In on the mixer). Second, does anybody have any advice on a good application to use on my MBP for recording the multitracks? I've been using Presonus Capture, which has worked fine but it's pretty clunky. In the past, I owned Metacorder, but sold it and definitely can't afford to buy it as it's priced these days. The projects will probably be edited in FCP but post (in both cases) has been talking about jumping to Adobe. Boom Recorder would work although it also has gotten expensive. ProTools? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!