Tom Duffy

Probably stepping over the line with this info: TASCAM products for Canada ship out of the same Los Angeles Warehouse as the rest of the Americas, so any restriction on import to the USA will affect Canada as well, sorry.

An outright ban for either of these would cause outrage and legal action. Earlier in the year a law was passed that water company employees can report a homeowner to the police for lawn run-off (water that spills onto the sidewalk and thus flows to the storm drain, which goes to the sea, not the sanitary sewer), and thus get a fine. This is in practice going to have zero effect. From the number of houses around me that do this and don't care, I'd rather see the water company send out workers to each house and have then help tune the timing and amount the sprinkler runs to be efficient to start with. If a homeowner pays a lawn service to cut every week, they wouldn't be aware that they are overwatering. There is an incentive program for replacing a watered lawn with a drought resistant desert style landscape. At least one company is speciailizing in doing the work for you and getting paid 100% from the incentive. You have to prove that the sprinkler usage has gone down after the work though, so it doesn't help if you've already let the lawn go brown. There is allready a ban on filling a pool from empty. If you pull 12000+ gallons extra in a month, I'm sure the water company will be coming to talk with you. Banning topping up would lead to environmental problems though. Once the water level goes down due to evaporation, the skimmer ceases to operate, meaning the surface of the water is no longer clean, and becomes attractive to mosquitoes and other insects. The extra strain on the pool equipment as it constantly surges and gurgles the insufficient water flow can break it, leading to static water and more problems and cost to the homeowner. The biggest over-watering offenders are the roadside landscapes, so I expect to see big pressure from the state and water companies on the cities to be the first to reduce by 25%, and it won't be hard for them. The $100 incentive to change toilets (max one per household) to <1.3gpf runs out in June. I hope this gets extended, I'm not ready to do mine yet. I did experiments with my kids to note the water meter number before and after we did a bunch of water-using activities around the house when they had homework on it - our numbers were already way lower than the "the average household uses this much" numbers, except for our old toilet. I think about this stuff all the time, but like others here I'm running out of things to do to reduce usage. Water that goes down the drain gets cleaned and re-used (less the amount lost to leaks), so the real saving has to come from lawn and pool top-ups, the hardest ones to enforce. Should water rates become tiered? I hate the electric company for doing that, it made the ROI on a 100% electric vehicle out of the question (rant for another time).

As other posts have noted, recovery software will usually do a good job of recovering files after a "quick" format, one that only re-wrote the root directory contents. best practices review: To keep an SD card fresh and running at full speed, an occasional (*1) full format is recommended. The SD Card association's Formatter application (Mac + Windows) has 3 selections : Quick, Full (Erase) and Full (Random). Quick not only re-writes the root directory, it also rewrites the partition table. This normally makes no difference and wouldn't affect your ability to recover files, but a random ebay model might have been pre-formatted with non standard partitions, and if you use an SD card for a linux boot volume, it will be incorrect for normal use. The format function in the product itself should be 100% SD Card association compliant, but that's only something I would worry about for $20 MP3 players, not the products we are talking about here. Full (Erase) does a block erase on each sector of the SD card. Nothing can be recovered (*2), all the data has been reset to "FF". This is the factory fresh state, and restores write speed to full spec. Full (Random) writes random data to each sector of the SD card. Nothing can be recovered, and the card will exhibit its worse case write speed, because any new writes will incur a sector erase each time. (*1) How occassional - for a 32GB card, if you've written a total of 32GB data to it, all sectors have been used at least once, so it's time to do a full format. If you've only written 8GB to the card in one project, you're safe with a quick format, but 24GB is now the limit before the next recommended full format. (*2) Forensic methods claim to be able to read the gate voltage directly after opening the top of the chip and see the difference between an erased 1 and an erased 0. That's why secure erase involves multiple passes of random data followed by a final erase.

or things could still be ongoing, in a non-commenty kind of comment.

Now we really need a thread split.

bralleput, the discussion goes back to October last year when the DR-10 series was first announced at AES. There are a couple of older threads that cover all the speculation already. The search box finds those easily. We can certainly continue the conversation about the versions of the product that are available in various markets, but there is no inforrmation that can be shared about what is not available. For speculation, please use a different thread, that is my request. Jeff already spilit one thread out to aid this, but it is a admin pain to do so.

DR-10X and DR-10C have same board, same firmware with a couple of minor menu item differences. Jeff is right that this topic is rife for wild speculation, criticism and accusation. The facts are covered in layers of interpretation, and they are not available for public discussion, i.e. no comment.

The TA5 version is not available outside the US either. I'd love to explain why, but again, no comment.

All our products are FCC, CE and CCC tested in our own accredited facilities in Tokyo. This occurs prior to Mass production and would be unaffected by external decisions. Whether the paperwork is filed with the FCC is a matter of a few dollars. http://ts.nist.gov/standards/scopes/2003620.htm

From my limited information of non-US market availability: (and a rough translation from http://tascam.jp/product/dr-10c/ ) The TA5F version is not in production. The Sennheiser (3.5mm locking) is in production. The Shure version is available as base model or as an option plate The Sony/Ramsa version is an option plate.

Coming late to this: The TASCAM HS-4000 has encrypted recording as a paid upgrade. called "WAVLOCK". This is currently only marketed in Japan, and was developed at the special request of a major TV broadcasting company. The "password" can be imported to each unit from an encrypted file on a CF card, so even the operators don't know what the corporate secret is. The password can be changed at any time in the same manner. A companion app on Windows / Mac allows for de-encryption (and re-encryption) when importing the CF contents. Again the password is supplied in a pre-encrypted form, so operators don't know it, only that it matches the units in the field. Once set up, messing with the registry or attempting to copy the app to another machine garbles the password. The main reason for this is less first-amendment, more accident prevention. If someone walks up to a machine being used on location, pops a CF and walks off with it, all they have are WAV files that no audio software can play back. Tom (TASCAM)

The mkIIs are manufactured and on their way to the US. ditto for Europe. Customers in Japan already have their units. As I've mentioned for the mkI, I'm not familiar with the DR680, so whatever info I have is straight from the manual. I don't expect any change in current consumption between the two versions. Tom.

We (TASCAM) put true confidence monitoring in our 4 channel rack-mount CF recorder (HS-4000) as it was a requirement for a big customer. It reads back about 2 seconds delayed. To get this to work we had to custom optimize the file system low level code, qualify the cards to a higher standard than for regular recording, and we ran out of processing power to do it at greater than 1x rates. As Jeff explains, modern work flow deals with the issue differently now. Tom (TASCAM).

google images for "turn retainer" - I think that's what you need.

I was showing a colleage my technique and he said "hey, all the how-tos say to never melt the solder directly, and that's exactly what you're doing". Yep, I was doing that, but because I couldn't orient the tip to heat the work directly, and a small amount of the melted solder on the tip created a bridge through which the heat could then get to the part, and then see the solder get wicked across to the pin in question, then touch up afterwards. I've never had any luck with solder vacuums, wick braid has been 100% for me. I also find myself using one of these more often than not when working on PCBs, though the plane magnifying glass type is fine for cables. http://www.amazon.com/AmScope-SE400-Z-Professional-Microscope-Magnification/dp/B005C75IVM

Still looking? TASCAM US-2x2 $149 - 2 mic/line inputs, iOS compatible, no USB hub required.

Here's a Sony video deck from before the digital era. http://www.avss.com/pdf/recorders/pvw2800.pdf Specs : LTC IN - 0.5V to 18V p-p 10K Ohm. LTC Out - 1.2V, 75 Ohm. BNC T-pieces are common gear for distributing black-burst and LTC, so you'd expect the high-impedance input. So, a 2V LTC signal is probably too big for some equipment, hence the need to divide it down deliberately If the signal drops just because of a splitter, there's something wrong, as John explains.

2V is about 8dBu, which is 18dB over a -10dBu consumer or unbalanced input. An unbalanced input might be designed with a 16dB headroom, which would distort with that signal. The original EBU spec doesn't actually give a target voltage or even recommended practice - only rise time (25us = 15kHz bandwidth). If you see a hard square wave TimeCode signal, that's not to spec, it was originaly an analog signal designed to be recorded on a regular audio track. Some TC inputs are 50ohm (so they can use BNC and standard video cabling), some are Hi-Z, some are balanced. So for some equipment, a voltage halving cable might be useful...

Strong claims - what basis?

When you plug in the micro-usb it asks whether you want to use it for power only, or to mount the internal SD card as a reader. In that mode, the recorder is disabled, it is only a SD card bridge. I use that to put a firmware update file on the SD card, and pull off audio files. MicroUSB is supposed to be less fragile than MiniUSB. I haven't had one break yet but I'm always wary with my phone, which gets plugged / unplugged at least once a day.

We only test with power packs that are available world-wide, unfortunately that excludes most smart-phone power banks, which are all chinese rebrands. All our documented testing is done with AAs that are available world-wide e.g. Eneloop / Eneloop Pro / Panasonic alkalines and now Energizer lithiums. The users over at taperssection.com are happy to share their real-world test results on the power-packs that they find on sale. We don't have a power-curve calibrated for external power, it's either there or not, so you need a set of AAs in the product as well to switch over to automatically. Tom.

For historical accuracy: The TEAC DA-P20 was an OEM version of the Casio DA-7 DAT. The TASCAM DA-P1 was a complete ground up design.

Noting this: Was the Mac used for this work also a newer one with QuickTime 10 being used to playback the file?

DR-10C should be available in Sennheiser, Shure and Sony/Ramsa configs in Europe and other countries. As before, I don't have any particular shipping info for these regions. Only the DR-10X (XLR) is available in the Americas (USA and USA adjacents), because our distribution is from California.

a Thunderbolt to FireWire 800 adapter from apple is $29. FW800 to FW400 cables are <$10. should be easy to use a newer mac if you have access to one. Tom (TASCAM). Our DM-3200 mixer has a FireWire audio interface option, I regularly test it this way.