Recorder reliability

[Darren]

I often see the term reliability come up when reading threads here and elsewhere that are comparing various recording systems.  Here is a brief run down of some of the recorders that I have used so far, and my experiences with them.

NAGRA IV series:

- Never "lost" a take.

- Had the same nervous moments that everyone has probably experienced while watching the lid fill up with tape that should have been winding onto the take up reel.

- Turned in some pretty inferior sound while dealing with Quantagy's slitting issues (while Quantagy was blaming our machines).

FOSTEX PD-2:

Worked well for the most part, but towards the end of it's life (which seemed short relative to its cost), when it failed, it failed BIG and would not record at all do to PCM errors.

- Lost a take or 2 but by then was using it only as a back up.

FOSTEX PD-4:

Very reliable.  Only issue encountered was from occasional bad tapes, which were usually obvious right from the i.d. when they could easily be swapped out.  Sometimes POST would have poorly maintained machines, causing everything from not being able to playback the audio to actually chewing up the tape.

- Never lost a take.

HHB PORTADAT:

WOW, where to start???

- Intermittent inputs.

- Tapes that wouldn't eject.

- Tapes that got eaten.

- A large list of etceteras!

SONY PCM-800:

VERY reliable.  Well except for the one time that it was film break and the eject mechanism broke and the tape could not be ejected.  Finished the day on the backup DA-88.  Thank goodness for my great service guy who had the tape out and at telecine within the hour and the machine back in operation, with a new eject mechanism, by the end of the day.

SD 744T:

Pretty reliable for the most part but twice the machine would not go into record and therefore lost 2 takes.  Fortunately it was functioning as the backup at the time, which is not always the case.  This is probably not an unusual track record for a fairly recent NL recorder.

METACORDER SYSTEM:

So far, so good; as in 100% reliability.  Yes, I have used it in extreme heat, extreme moisture, extreme dust, and while it was literally bouncing up and down in an insert car on a pot holed road.  It has been used in heavy Salt Water mists on the West Coast of the Gulf Islands.  It has been used in the high humidity of an indoor wave tank where most of your equipment is literally dripping with condensation.  And yes, f/w and USB connections are not as robust as XLR's etc.  Have I EVER had one fail or inadvertently become disconnected?  NO.

My point in all of this is that, for the most part, none of the recorders that we have traditionally used have been 100% reliable.  Nothing is, or ever will be; ask NASA.

I'm also not trying to state that a computer based system will be more reliable than a hardware based system.  What I am saying is that when comparing between these distinctly different recording systems, reliability should *not* necessarily be the deciding factor.

Cheers!

Darren

[Eric Toline]

Sorry but I take exception to your remarks about the HHb Portadat. While I don't doubt your experiences, I must say that my Portadats have performed flawlessly for the past 13 years and continue to do so.

Eric

[Darren]

No need to take exception Eric.  As the first paragraph of my post says, it is a run down of "my" experiences.  I'm glad to hear that your Portadats did, and do, work well for you.

Cheers!

Darren

[Jeff Wexler]

No need to take exception Eric.  As the first paragraph of my post says, it is a run down of "my" experiences.  I'm glad to hear that your Portadats did, and do, work well for you.

Cheers!

Darren

I am always surprised when reports of experiences with any given piece of gear come in that seem to be so different. I guess it is just the nature of complex equipment, manufacturing QC, etc. For me personally (even though ALL the DAT experience is now so far in the past) I had nothing but trouble with all the professional DAT machines until I got the HHB PortaDAT. I did countless movies with the one machine and never had any difficulty (other than the inherent difficulties of the DAT format). I recommended the HHB to several people and my good friend Stuebe bought one and had TROUBLE continuously!

Regards,  Jeff Wexler

[Darren]

I always wondered if all of the users that had troubles with a given model of DAT machine, had the *same* troubles?

[Jeff Wexler]

I always wondered if all of the users that had troubles with a given model of DAT machine, had the *same* troubles?

Good question. I know in the case of the dreaded "sunlight problem" with the StellaDAT recorder, many people had the problem but it took several months to diagnose even as we all discussed the failures but unable to tie it all together to one flaw in the machine. So many of the various DAT machines had at one time or another many of the same problems...  we will probably never know (and thankfully DAT is essentially a dead format now so it is all history).

Regards,  Jeff Wexler

[Philip Perkins]

I had 3 different HHBs, and they all had different histories.  One was so weirdly unreliable that after extended trips to 3 different service centers (including HHB itself) HHB swapped it out for me with a loaner/demo machine even though my recorder was way out of warrantee.  This 2nd machine was MOSTLY ok thru thick and thin all around the world etc.  The 3rd machine, bought used from a retiring soundman, never so much as burped.  They were complicated boxes, those HHBs,

I guess. 

Philip Perkins CAS

[old school]

Hey all, greetings. My Nagras never gave me a problem, and still work well in my home studio. My 2  hhb's were real troopers and worked many hard hours without trouble. I allways said that this was because I would hit record and roll until we shot the whole sceen, or they called lunch. I never hit the pause button, and only hit the stop button when we had 10 or more minutes of downtime. Some friends had bad times with both the Fostex and HHB's, but as glad as I am that Dat is dead, I still own both of them. One is in my van, cause who knows, and one is with Stu McKee's as a back up machine. My Deva 4 is 2 & 1/2 years old and has been trouble free aside from a easy fix for a time code drift that my brother and I both experienced. My SD 744t is 4 months old and so far so good. I have heard some sad stories about all the different hard drive recorders, but my two seem rock solid. When we all move on to the next generation of recorders, I'm sure I'll keep the Deva and Sd as well.

CrewC

[Philip Perkins]

I only ever had two problems w/ Pilotone Nagras--a bad speed adjustment on a rental machine (outside of SLO range!) and another bad service resulting in incorrect bias and bad sound.  The TC Nagras were another story--I had a number of IVS-TC disasters, some caused by my errors and some by software problems.  I was one of the late Harvey Warnke's original TCS guinea pigs, and thus experienced a few teething issues (the first time I realized that I had a machine that could "crash" like a computer), but after that those mods were very reliable.  I still have the Harvey-ized Nagra, the HHBs I felt lucky to be able to sell.  I miss my Nagra III.

Philip Perkins CAS

[soundtrane]

Phil, who is Harvey? I still think it is very very relevant for someone (maybe me, maybe someone better) to "chronicle" the eras of audio, a book about this is very very important. at least a book. if not anything else...

I had written about the possibility of a book on this forum a while back, and everytime i read posts like yours, i think what i say becomes truly important. it's legacy and history and stories and much more probably....

-vin

[soundtrane]

<<<

As I tested telephone lines, I found one I'd forgotten. Some years previously, shortly before he died, my techno friend Harvey Warnke obtained a voicemail from me.

Harvey was a unique spirit. Self-educated, he'd learned electronics working in the planetarium, then learned to design light shows. He worked on movies, too.

If you've seen the remake of Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, in one of the later scenes there is the miouw of a cat; that was Harvey's cat, whom he named Shi*ty Kitty.

If you saw the movie War Games, in the final war-room scene you saw the huge screens that show missiles launching all over the world; It was Harvey who made those huge screens with their flashing images.

Long ago, he and I traded a project. He designed relays and sensors for the Line Seizer device I built for Network Answering Service, and I in turn programmed his Counter Intelligence device, which counted frames of film on a film-editing table for splicing movies. It was a grand time. Harvey was a brilliant engineer, who drove a turbo-charged motorcycle at vast speeds. He was always laughing, always fun.

His death came suddenly. He'd contracted some kind of virus, and the virus, invading his heart, made his heart very large and very weak. And then one day, his heart stopped.

>>>

<<<

At the time, I couldn't bring myself to delete the voice mailbox with the recording of his voice. I forgot it was there, until now.

Sitting there at my desk in San Anselmo, calling into the machine, suddenly I hear my friend talking. His voice has survived the years and the equipment changes. He promises to return calls, but he will not.

His voice remains, in the machine.

And you know what?

I still can't erase it.

>>>

http://www.bloggard.com/blog//item/209

Is that all one is supposed to know about this man? He must have been remarkable, like we all are, kind of...

Legacy.

History.

Story.

Inspiration.

-vin

[Philip Perkins]

Harvey was a bonafide intuitive mostly self-taught electronics genius, with the sort of knowledge, initiative and vision that made Silicon Valley what it became.  In addition to what was mentioned, Harvey also worked at Otari in its heyday.  Once, when I had my gear at his shop, he heard me say that I had an Otari EC201 TC reader.  He had me bring it in, and without checking any schematics and with some parts he had laying around, he modified it to output the field rate of any TC input to the box.  This was a massively useful tool for fixing problematic sync from TC Nagras, and he did it in about 10 minutes.  It turned out he'd designed the thing.  He was always surprising me with some offhand remark about some big project he'd worked on, while he tweaked and improved my Nagra TC board.  I had originally come to him for his Nagra IV-S TC mod (after having had 2 other TC mods to my stereo Nagra) because I couldn't afford a new Nagra IVS-TC.  What he ended up getting my machine to do was WAY beyond the capabilites of the factory IVS-TC, and with a far more accurate clock.  By the time of his death the industry was going over to DAT, and Harvey had new plans for new projects, but I never got to hear what they were.  Too bad for all of us.

Philip Perkins CAS