Can we get reviews as to how the HS-P82 and Nagra 6 been performing out in the field?

[jrd456]

Tom,

Also,to have the ability to adjust the input level with the pots on the front ,when the inputs are set to line.

J.D.

[Tom Duffy]

Tom,

Also,to have the ability to adjust the input level with the pots on the front ,when the inputs are set to line.

J.D.

Yes, this is coming in the next version as well, also fixing the problem with not being able to Retake when mirroring, and adding a mode that automatically starts recording when incoming TimeCode is detected. (Same as Sound Devices's Auto Rec and Deva's Auto Load)

Tom.

[NOLAfishwater]

Tom, I absolutely love the on the fly Midside mixing. Been nothing but happy with my p82. thanks for the support

[JackHenry]

Now THAT'S what I'm talking about NOLA

[audiohound]

Hi guys,

I recently got my Tascam HS-P82 and was hunting for a good battery solution. NOLAfishwater you suggested a great option, but I have two questions for you.

1. Did you route your battery out to the XLR DC in of the TASCAM? I tried sending my battery out to the DC in and it won't power with it.

2. The BP 160 has a rating of 4.5A max while the HS-P82 says that for external DC in, it should be 2A. Did that create any problems with your setup? I am concerned if I will be sending double the current than rated and fry up my machine...

Any help would be highly appreciated as I have a shoot coming soon and have to figure out the battery situation.

thanks.

[JackHenry]

Tom, I absolutely love the on the fly Midside mixing. Been nothing but happy with my p82. thanks for the support

NOLA

How does the Tascam P882 compare with the SD7xx with regard to M/S options. As you know, with the SD you can record as M/S or record as L/R and monitor as M/S.

Regards

John

[Tom Duffy]

With the HS-P82, M/S decoding can be done on Input (records the decoded signal), or in Monitoring only, so the M/S signals are recorded raw.

This can be selected individually (actually per pair of channels). The M/S width is not fixed, you get a control for 0-100.

Tom (TASCAM)

[Tom Duffy]

Hi guys,

I recently got my Tascam HS-P82 and was hunting for a good battery solution. NOLAfishwater you suggested a great option, but I have two questions for you.

1. Did you route your battery out to the XLR DC in of the TASCAM? I tried sending my battery out to the DC in and it won't power with it.

2. The BP 160 has a rating of 4.5A max while the HS-P82 says that for external DC in, it should be 2A. Did that create any problems with your setup? I am concerned if I will be sending double the current than rated and fry up my machine...

Any help would be highly appreciated as I have a shoot coming soon and have to figure out the battery situation.

thanks.

Audiohound reached me via the Trew Audio page, and also worked this through with Coffee Sound. It turns out the battery connector with the BP 160 doesn't have the same pin size as the HS-P82, so it wasn't making a good connection. Coffee Sound supplied him with a different connector tip.

I noted to him that the DC IN jack has a cut off voltage of 12V exactly, so this is fine for a regulated external battery pack like the BP 160, but making a 4 Pin XLR connector cable allows access to the EXT DC programmable cut off voltages.

He also answered his own question, it's not a problem for the power supply to have a greater amperage capacity than the HS-P82.

Tom.

[JackHenry]

Thanx Tom

So it is essentially like the Sound Devices in that regard.

Regards

John

[NOLAfishwater]

sorry for the delayed response. Isaac kind of got in the way. No power for 6 days. looks like most of the questions sent my way were answered. I hacked the factory power cable for the bp160 and wired a 4pin xlr on the end.

[audiohound]

Thanks for the reply and follow up on Trew audio forum. I am posting my question from Trew audio forum here for more feedback / input.

"Hello Tom and others,

Can you guys share some of your experience with the limiters with P82? I know am posting this again, but I need some feedback as I am on this show where everything is pretty much improv and the levels are all over the place. I am one man show with no boom op, so I can’t ride my levels while booming.

I have the limiters on for the channels am using, but I get signal clipping very easily on yelling etc. It seems like my limiters are not even kicking in (they are on in the settings) I really don’t want to use the -25dB pad if I don’t have to. It just doesn’t sound the same as without pad. My previous recorder was 1/3rd the price of P82 and it had excellent limiters that didn’t let me clip almost always.

So, what can we do with P82 to make it not clip our signal? If we are on reality shows etc, we really need strong limiters as the levels are all over the place. The limiters have been my only deal breaker point on the TASCAM. I am now very very very cautious about my levels instead of selecting a good range with some headroom, I have to keep them intentionally low.

Tom, is there something am doing wrong? Maybe my limiters are not even kicking in even when being on.. If not, is there a way that strong limiters can be introduced in a firmware in very near future? Maybe the limiters are only working on the output mix but not on individual channels? This would be not good if that’s the case.

Without strong limiters, folks who are doing reality / improv as a single man band are highly disadvantaged. This might even force me to reconsider my purchase and sell it for something else…

Thanks!"

[Tom Duffy]

The HS-P82 limiters are very strong. Per the specs they kick in at -5dB, but there is an additional 18dB of headroom that kicks in when the limiters are on. The ratio is 32:1, so it will catch anything you throw at it.

The limiters are on all 8 channels, as well as an additional one on the stereo bus.

The metering is after the limiter, but since the threshold is close to the top, it would be difficult to see limiting going on in the meter

itself.

There may be some confusion about what the clip indicator is showing. Blue means the limiter caught something.

Red means either the digital signal clipped (e.g. at -0.03dB), which is very unlikely when the limiter is on, OR, if the level just after the A/D converter is too high. That 2nd clipping indicator is currently set too conservatively, so it is going Red even though the limiter brought the level down. It's less of a clipping indicator, more of a "potential analog distortion" indicator.

I will hook the HS-P82 up to a Audio Precision analyser here to double check where the Red light is coming on and see if we can make it less panic-inducing.

[audiohound]

Thanks Tom for the clarification and assurance about the red peaks. If the red peaks can be lifted to a higher level and not so conservative, we would be much better off and confident. When you say "potential analog distortion", does that mean we are getting distorted when those red lights hit?

So, there is probably no way we can get after limiter levels on the main screen? In that case, how would we know the levels we are recording at? It seems like the only way is playback and check.. I think people would benefit hugely if somehow they can see the exact levels they are recording at even after the limiter. When the limiter kicks in, it might be bringing us down to -6dB on scale or -10dB, we won't know the final levels our tracks are being recorded at. I just did a test where I was tapping my mic and the levels were going all the way to zero with blue and then red lights... but I never knew my end level that the limiter was dropping me to.. this keeps us in the dark! Maybe the levels shouldn't go all the way to 0 when the limiter is on. After -5dB, they just start hovering in the range that the limiter is dropping them to?

Thanks..

[studiomprd]

" When you say "potential analog distortion", does that mean we are getting distorted when those red lights hit? "

what that means to me is "getting close" / "approaching distortion", and yes, if hitting it hard and frequently, probably a bit of distortion...

" The metering is after the limiter, " means,

The metering is after the limiter,

[audiohound]

Got it!

[Richard Newton]

Tom,

Last week I did an unscripted gig for a horror network, there was a lot of screaming, and by the end of the day I was very confident in the blue.... I have to agree with those on the Trew thread who've said,"don't change a thing" personally I love the limiters as they are.

Thanks

[Tom Duffy]

Thanks, I did some more testing, and although the red peak indicator shows some activity, the limiter is doing a good job.

[NOLAfishwater]

Tom, do you think that with a future firmware upgrade that one of the bnc connectors can we used to accept a spdif signal as well? The only cable I have found out there that will allow you to record SPDIF in is this ALVA cable http://www.alva-audio.de/en_products.php?page=content/products/en_cableware_aesebu_product&subpage=content/products/en_aes_id

[Tom Duffy]

The HS-P82 digital in DB-25 is currently hard coded to ignore "Consumer" encoded data, so even converting a S/PDIF signal to balanced 110 ohm into the DB25 won't help right now, unless the sending device can flip the bit in the stream to signal it is "Professional".. That's not difficult to fix though in the future. What S/PDIF source are you looking at connecting?

The Word/Video in BNC has a path through the FPGA, so in theory we could add a S/PDIF decoder and route the audio in that way (even getting audio to the Stereo recorded track instead of a pair of channels), but, and it's a big but, we already filled the FPGA to over 100% capacity. (That's why 172kHz audio went bad in V1.10, we didn't notice that the timing had gotten too tight, we had to clean up some unused bits to get it back under 100% and fit all timing constraints for V1.11).

So, although it's something I would like to add, right now it doesn't look easy.

[NOLAfishwater]

Say for converting old DAT tapes, taking a digital signal from another recorder, or being able to connect with spdif out from my CPU. Its not really that important. More just a want than a need. Thanks for answering my question.

[codyman]

I just picked up a HS-P82 last week.  Haven't been on any narrative gigs yet (just docs) but so far I've been very impressed.  I really like the touch screen interface and although a few options seemed to be "hiding" from me, I soon found myself breezing through the menus finding whatever I needed.  You really can't beat the price on this thing vs the features it comes with.

 

As per recommendations, I picked up the BP-160 battery and am going to put that through the paces to see how that works out for me in remote shoots (Shooting in rural Arizona followed immediately by Illinois for a documentary this coming week, should be interesting to see how it handles the heat followed by the frigid cold...).  I haven't bag mixed with it yet, but for this gig I will have a little bit of that with some run and gun kind of stuff so we'll see how my pack with the HS-P82 / BP-160 / Lavs / accoutrements will be like under harness (and hopefully not on slick ice...) 

 

One question I do have that maybe Tom or someone else that has used this unit extensively, I noticed that when I had the unit plugged into AC with timecode running (and the option to keep the timecode going despite being powered off).  I noticed that the unit, unplugged (and with no batteries) retained the timecode for a few hours when I went and plugged it in a few hours later?  How long does this unit retain timecode like that?

[aristotle_kumpis]

I've been using the HS-P82 with the controller for 4 months now. I really love it. I use it for cart jobs, and it's extremely easy to navigate the menus. It sounds great, and it has a very small footprint.

[rb1138]

I was given an HS-P82 for a reality show I was on once. This is definitely not the right use for this machine. It's quite heavy. The 788 is sooo much lighter in comparison. Along with all the wireless, I felt like I was going to collapse sometimes. 

 

The touch screen is really awesome. It took me much less time to figure out how to use it compared to the 788 (at first). 

 

The preamps are quite clean, though they don't sound as good as the 788's preamps, and I don't think they have as much range as the 788's either. The limiter on the P82 isn't bad though and I often couldn't tell it was on. Again, I do prefer the 788's limiters (adjusted to the classic limiter settings of the 744 and so forth, of course). 

 

It comes with (or I was given) an external power source of some sort. It lasted most of the day whatever it was. I don't have a reference though because I had just gotten my NP1 only after that time so I don't know how NP1s would do on this same machine. 

 

 

 

Sawrab

[Tom Duffy]

"Timecode when powered off" - this is run off the NP1 battery.   The processor / FPGA / memory are kept powered on, so it will use up some battery life.

 

With an Lithium Ion NP1 you should get 4 to 5 hours recording.time.

 

Tom.

[Julian P]

Also question about the timecode:

 

I had a timecode test today, timecode out of nagra into timecode in of hs-p82 in jam sync mode. that was 10 o'clock in the morning.

Afterwards powered off the hs-p82. switched on again in the evening to view a possible drift and noticed that the timecode stopped to count at about 3 o'clock afternoon. Battery was full. why didn't the timecode keep on running?

 

tomorrow I'm going to make a timecode test with hs-p82 being the master, using freerun timecode to sync the alexa in jam sync mode. but just to have a look how it works. unfortunately not enough time for a long time test.

 

 

Question to Tom:

 

It would be cool, if one would have the possibility to always see the timecode running in freerun or time of day mode on the main screen! Also, if the machine does not record. perhaps by touching the timecode several times on the display?

I need this for series shooting for always knowing or checking, if my timecode is still in sync with the camera. possible?