Fostex D108 noise

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Roy Mills

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Hi

I have just purchased a Fostex D108 recorder at a good price (new) and set it up today. The quality, as expected, is excellent, but I'm rather surprised at how much mechanical noise is produced during both record and playback.

A friend of mine used to have a Fostex DMT8 (a couple of generations before the D108) and as I recall, it was silent during record and playback.

I get some hard disk whine, which is expected, but it's the mechanical 'clunk' at half second intervals that disturbs me. It corresponds with the hard disk read/write led flashing on and off and can be heard easily at 10 to 15 feet away.

Should it make this noise, or is something wrong? It has a 30GB IBM drive. I would have thought that during recording and mixing, any noise would be distracting to the performer and engineer and easily picked up my a mic etc. There was no mention of this noise in Sound-on-Sound's review here in the UK.

I realise that I can get the 15m extension cable and put the recorder remote from the control panel, but have any other D108 owners experienced this??

Thanks for your help

Roy


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The D108-D160-D824-D1624 family share a mechanical design. They can be a bit noisy, but it is quite easy to fix that. I talked about the mods I made to my 1624 last year: http://www.homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?threadid=19703 . I had more problems with fan noise than with drive clicking on the Quantums I use, bu tmany of the techniques I used should be applicable...

You'll find that the Dynamat work on the front plates will help a lot, and if you still have too much drive clicking, you can cut an aluminum blanking plate to hang over the drive carrier opening on the front panel pegs, and gasket it in place with some foam.
 
Thanks for that. I've done some further research as follows:

I'd initially recorded in two-track stereo and that produced all the 'clunking' noise. When I recorded just a single channel though, it was quiet. I could then add further tracks, one at a time, and play anywhare between one and eight back together with no noise.

However, as soon as two or more channels are recorded simultaneously, the clunking caused by the disk read/write returns AND it gets significantly worse as the track count increases. At eight tracks simultaneously recording, it's just about unusable.

I'm going to speak to the UK Fostex importers about this tomorrow but I can see that some sound insulation measures are on the horizon. Probably will try and locate the recorder in a separate room and cable it through the wall or something.

Thanks for your help
 
Sounds like one noisy drive! The Quantums aren't nearly that bad... Best of luck!
 
Skippy,

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds like a prob with the drive rather than the Fostex itself. If that is the case I would be pushing the Fostex people for a replacement drive.

My D160 does similar things, but not to any objectionable degree.

:cool:
 
Just taken a look inside the D108 box and also inside the hard disk caddy. There's plenty of room for insulation measures as Skippy suggested.

I spoke with the Fostex service people today and they were pretty helpful. They told me that the Quantum drives (turns out mine is a quantum but with an IBM label on it) aren't the quietest. They stress that not all hard drives will work with the D108 but that the Maxtor 540X/4 series will. They also said that up to about 100MB should be OK! That might be of interest for anyone wishing to upgrade.

They are going to try and replicate my problem in their lab and report back. I'm also waiting on a call from them to establish whether the newer Maxtor D740X series are compatible. They have 7200rpm spindle speed as opposed to 5400rpm and an average seek time quoted as 8mS as opposed to <12mS. They are also supposed to have what Maxtor refer to as 'Quiet Drive technology'.

Will post more when I hear from Fostex but I'll definitely be doing some sound insulation.

Thanks
 
Update as promised for anyone who is interested.

I have now installed a Maxtor 540X series 40GB drive (model 4KD40H2) as recommended and approved by Fostex...

1) This drive is now much quieter and the machine is now much more usable although I've added just a little extra insulation. The drive can still be heard operating as it records but it's now acceptably quiet. The spindle rotation is much quieter also.

2) Interestingly, although this drive is approved by Fostex, when you push the display button to show the remaining time on the disk, it no longer does so. It only shows the drive capacity as 40GB.

Further discsssion with the (very helpful) engineer at Fostex revealed the following...

1) Apparently the 30GB Quantum drive that currently ships with the D108 has a 7200rpm spindle speed, which I didn't realise. This accounts for a lot of the whining noise. The Maxtor is 5400rpm. The engineer said that it didn't matter for recording -any comments?? It sounds fine to me.

2) Fostex are aware of the 'remaining time' display issue as it had been reported before. Apparently, the operating system only handles this function up to a 30GB capacity and so it should return when 25% or 10GB of the 40GB disk has been used. This is fine by me, as I only want to know about remaining time when it's an issue and at between 30 and 40GB it's not.

Fostex have asked for the original Quantum drive to be returned to them for testing, so we'll see what their verdict is.

Hope this is of interest to someone!

Roy
 
Yes, I'm interested (I've got a D1624 and have read Skippy's posts on the mods he did.). Let us know what happens with the Quantum. Thanks, Gelon
 
The latest update on this is that when Fostex received the hard disk for testing, it would not even boot up for them! We can only conclude therefore that the disk may have been on the edge of failure anyway and that a journey in the post finally did for it! I'm still not sure that I can relate such a condition to the mechanical noise it produced though - it recorded perfectly well. I think it was just a noisy drive that was going to fail anyway.

Fostex replaced the 30GB Quantum with a brand new 40GB Maxtor which is much quieter - though still not absolutely silent.I hinted that as I'd had to buy another drive in the first place to prove the point that they might like to sent me a free caddy as a spare - but no such luck. Anyway, I think Fostex have behaved well and done what they could.

The D108 is a great recorder but needs some re-engineering in terms of soundproofing and fitting an optimally quiet drive. This is not especially relevant if you enjoy the luxury of separate studio and control room (and the cabling to go with it) but I've found the original drive just too noisy working in the same room with say, acoustic guitar. Fitting the Maxtor drive and a little insulation has now made it acceptable.

For all you D108 users, I think the key facts are that you can install much larger hard drives if you wish (but check your OS version and see the Fostex web site) and that Maxtors are much quieter than Quantums.

Hope this helps and thanks for all your interest.

Roy
 
That's interesting - I wouldn't have imagined there was that much difference. I'd be interested in what Skippy thinks, as he's using Quantum drives in his units. I also would have thought that the slower spindle speed might have had a negative impact on recording and/or playpack. Thanks for the info. Gelon
 
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