Mic or Line in

[jdisdle]

I recently bought a MZ NH700. Mainly to use along side a video camera for coach touring holidays. The manual record feature is fine. But there are times when you have to hit record quickly, and AGC can distort the start of the recording. Especially from the mic. input as I found on my now broken MZ R700.

These forums have made me think of recording via the line in. Circuits for mic. pre-amps can be found on the web, and I have used one that powers an electret mic. insert from a PP3 9volt battery. The gain is 11db or 23db switched.

Recording a train passing slowly through point work causes the video camera AGC to pump. Wrecking the audio. There is no manual rec. on this camera. That`s why I used this as a test.

Results from the NH700 using either the pre-amp/line in at 23db, or a powered Sony MS907 plugged to mic. in with AGC at normal, produced a very good recording. This was from about 20ft from the track.

Looking at the waveforms in Cool Edit show that although the spikes on both the NH700 recordings are a little off the scale the AGC is not pumping.

I used SS 3.2 to download tracks.

The technical bit..

Have I wasted my time with the pre-amp?

Is the AGC on a minidisk superior to a video camera?

I have read that the Line in AGC has a greater dynamic range. Is this true?

Your replied will be appreciated.