Brian Ferrell
New member
The Tascam 788 I bought used keeps stopping in the middle of a recording. The record/play lights go out and the channel record red lights start flashing, indicating that it has returned to record standby mode. I strongly suspect a faulty power supply because even before I got it off Ebay the seller told me that the LCD display flickered but that it didn't affect the functioning of the machine. Our band sometimes practises in the chicken coop (no kidding) outside my house but there is only one power wire going out there and it is about 150 feet long. Sometimes when the bass player cranks up and plays something, the lights dim slightly, indicating that the coop isn't getting enough power for a whole band. We tried recording in the coop with the 788 a couple of weeks ago and we'd get in the middle of one song and it would stop recording. If we just let it record with no one playing at all it would keep recording. It wasn't vibrations that caused the stoppage because I physically shook the machine while it was recording and it kept recording. Figuring it was the low power of the chicken coop that was causing the problem, we tried recording in a rental store (off-business hours) that the drummer is a manager of. It worked much better this time allowing us to get in about 45 minutes of steady recording before it kicked off again in the middle of a song. I believe this 788 has 2 hard drives- (a stock internal one?) and a 60 GB one that the previous owner installed. I know there is plenty of room on the HD because I once used it to record about 3 hours of a live gig that we did- which I erased afterwards to make room for new recording. Has anyone experienced this type of problem with the 788 (or another digital recorder) or does anyone have a clue as to what might be causing the problem? As I said, I strongly suspect the power supply because it did record a lot longer at appliance store where there was more power. Maybe recording in the low-power chicken coop weakened the power supply. I've heard that getting enough power can damage appliances. I contacted Tascam but they just referred me to a service center that will probably cost more than what I paid for it ($200).