Originally Posted by wayne

it could be the pre-amp - Sony D100 dat recorders (and earlier) are known for this. The mic is fine - it clobbers the pre-amp which saturates before the tape level detector. The levels look fine initially, you can tell though - when you turn the record gain control up the levels don't rise since they've been clipped by the invisible pre-amp stage. On a D100 if you're at an electic gig and recording with a gain setting less than 3 you're almost certainly going to end up with this problem.