jamesperrett

Sounds a bit like an issue with the sleeve connection to the jack - maybe dirt or maybe a design fault caused by a long thin track inside the laptop. Feeding a low impedance will probably make the problem worse. Alternatively, could there be some kind of enhancement software running? Some devices have some fancy Dolby processing which can be difficult to disable.

If you are in education shouldn't you be using Onecall rather than CPC or Farnell? The prices on the Onecall site are usually lower than the normal CPC/Farnell sites.

Quiet sounds from the tweeter only sounds a bit like crosstalk which would mean that the amplifier is working but the signal isn't getting through. Check all the switches and connections first. Is there any signal from the Mix Out connector?

The Behringer is pretty much the only choice in that price range if you want to buy new. If you don't mind looking at used gear then I've seen Focusrite Octopres go for good prices or you may find an old Firewire audio interface that can be used as a D/A in stand-alone mode.

I'm going to suggest Reaper. It is very efficiently coded and, in my experience, very reliable. I've used it to record live shows running 32 inputs via USB from a Behringer X32 a few times and it has run all afternoon and evening with no issues. In my case I start and stop recording for each act but it can also handle long continuous recordings too. You can set up templates and also set up file naming in the preferences - you can use the project name in the file name but I'm not sure that you can use region or marker names (although I bet someone has created a script to do this as Reaper is very extendable). As an example of how efficiently coded it is, I can run 24 44.1/48kHz or 16 96kHz inputs on an ancient Acer laptop with only 768MB of memory - this is limited by my audio interface rather than the computer. I've not tried this old laptop on the X32 but I suspect that it will work if the particular X32 interface has XP drivers. There is a specific live recording view on the mixer panel which gives you meters with track names under them and just a few basic controls and you can set it up so that the remaining disk space is shown in both bytes and recording time for the current recording format. It is free to try and, once the demo time has expired, the only difference that you will see is that there is a wait of 5 seconds before you can start using the program so, even if you decide not to buy, you will still have access to your session files (the audio is recorded in standard .wav, aiff, flac or a few other formats which are almost universally readable).

Wouldn't it be simpler to trigger another drum module next to the mixer via MIDI - possibly even another DM7X or a DM5? No need to faff around with loading samples and it should be pretty much plug and play.

Do you have a proper battery management policy (which includes logging the number of charges and fully discharging every pack every few weeks)? If so, Sennheiser ought to replace the pack as you will be able to show that it hasn't performed to spec (assuming you've done less than 1000 cycles with it). I'd contact Sennheiser anyway. If you get no joy from Sennheiser, the packs look like they use standard Panasonic cells with some added management electronics so you can probably replace the cells but you may need to reset any data contained in the electronics. James.