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Extremely Short AA Battery Life for Tascam DR100
Hi Guys!
I have been recording with my Tascam DR100. Now I don’t love this recorder and my #1 reason is the battery life. It has both an internal (removable) Lithium Ion battery and takes 2 AA batteries. The problem is that even fully charged the Li Battery lasts for maybe 2 hours or so of recording time (which isn’t horrible, but could be better).
This becomes a problem when I then switch to AA batteries. 2 brand new, AA batteries only last about 5 minutes of recording! I have been having this problem for months and have tried using other recorders and equipment, but I really want to get this thing working until I can afford to upgrade to a Sound Devices recorder. (Note: this happened with just 1 Sennheiser Lavalier mic receiver plugged in & another time with a Rode NTG2 plugged in)
Are other people having this problem with trying to run the Tascam DR100 off AA batteries? 5 minutes of recording time is pretty unacceptable. Am I missing something here? Maybe I have some setting on that sucks the battery life out quickly?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
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9 Replies
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Somewhere in the manual that came with your unit is a battery life chart. Check that to see what Tascam estimates. OTOH 5 min on Alkaline AA’s say there’s something wrong unless there’s a setting in the menu for alkaline batterys. I would contact Tascam tech support and explain it to them. They’re pretty good at customer support.
Eric.
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How old is your unit? I have recently experienced similar battery drain on an older Zoom H4N which seems to be the end of the life for the unit, unless I can get to some service company that can fix it cheaper than 1/2 the price of new (which I doubt).
The fact that Lithium’s are lasting 2 hours while double AAs are not is odd though. Maybe the Lithium’s would last a lot longer if the unit worked “right”.
Al
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Hi Eric and Al,
Thanks for your responses. I called Tascam per your suggestion and they said I needed to manually go in and change the battery setting to AA batteries from Lithium Ion in the menu. They said I need to do this even if I eject the LI battery and only have AAs in. I will try this and report back soon if it helped.
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Hi guys,
I’ve had the same problem with my DR100 since I bought it.
I don’t suppose you’ve looked into extra lithium batteries have you?
Tascam want £43 and the cheaper BP-L2 I bought doesn’t fit. Just wondered if you’d had any luck with that?
Cheers -
Hello there,
I have the same problem with my new Tascam DR100. Once the Li battery runs out, it is impossible to record with AA batteries and the +48V on for more than 20 minutes.
I looked into buying the extra battery pack, but I start doubting it is going to solve anything.
Greg
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I have the same issue. It’s the DR100mkII and on Lithium it’s fine, but both alkaline (Duracell)and NiMh (Eneloop) batteries won’t last longer than a few minutes, if phantom power is on.
This is a huge issue, it makes the recorder basically unusable for me if I’m working in the field for more than a few hours. -
It seems that it’s all the same issues
for my DR-V1HD VIDEO/LINEAR PCM RECORDER then!?
Do they really make Lithium batteries in AA form? -
my suggestion would be to use the recorder as a “recorder” only and find a mixer to handle all of your front end ( phantom, better pre amp, actual pots/faders, usually constructed with better battery life) . I’ve run the Tascam DR 100 as a recorder being fed by a mixer for nearly half a day on productions. Pro Cell Duracell’s seem to work the best. QUESTION: I just bought a brand new lithium ion rechargeable battery for the DR 100, does anyone have a solid guesstimation as to how long this battery will last, given its fully charged and used in the scenario depicted above.
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Id think that any “domestic battery powered” unit running phantom power is going to struggle beyond a short time
PeterPost Production Dubbing Mixer
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