If at first you don't succeed, get a drill
A couple weeks ago, I went up to Boston to record the wonderful Julia Torgovitskaya aka juliatorgo at Tufts' exceptional new Distler Performance Hall in the Granoff Music Center. I use an incredibly simple, cheap and effective rig to record live to two which consists of 2 AKG C 414 B-XLS microphones, 1 Aphex 207D and an M Audio Microtrack. This allows for pretty transparent and noiseless stereo 24/96 recording for around $2000 which is ideally suited to classical or anything else where you want to capture the true sound that needs no tonal manipulation.

Well, after more than an hour of recording, we were onto Monica's Waltz from Menotti's The Medium (which I must confess I am not fond of) and I started getting intermittent pops on the left channel. I had no idea why as I had never had any problems with this rig and there didn't seem to be any pattern to the pops or correlation with anything we were doing. My only guesses were that the tube in the Aphex was going or the power in the room was problematic as the readout on my power conditioner was up around 122 volts. Thankfully, we managed to get the takes we needed.

A few days later at home I plugged my 207D in and just watched it for a few hours. Sure enough, it eventually started popping randomly on channel 1 despite the fact that nothing was connected to it. I think the problem was that this unit has no cooling and being over volt and racked next to other gear was a recipe for disaster. I opened the unit up to make sure though.

What a mistake that was.

As much as I love this unit, they definitely skimped on the chassis. I have no idea how two of the top plate screws were held in place previously as they do not fit the threads. I can only assume that the less than precisely placed holes on the plate clamped the screws into place by not lining up with the threaded sockets. Well, I think I am correct as one of the screw heads got separated from its body when I forced it in with my Dewalt. This caused the face of the unit to bow rendering the spring on the digital rate selector inoperable.

So now I have to get this screw body out that is not extending beyond the chassis. After about 30 seconds of attempting to rotate it with a false head made out of putty, I opted to instead destroy the plate around the threaded socket with my drill.