Marantz PMD-570 4Gb CF cards?

[Solstace]

Hi everyone

 

We have a case open with the distributor, but as this will involve sending a bunch of machines to their service dept to somewhere else in mainland Europe, I thought I'd see if anyone here has had any DIY success on this front:

 

Basically, we found out the hard way that our machines are not compatible with any of the 4Gb CF cards we've tried. We've found out that a Firmware upgrade would likely fix the issue, and we've even been sent FW to have a go ourselves. Using our XP netbook and a USB-Serial adaptor we've established a connection to the machine and uploaded the firmware, but still the symptoms persist.

 

Symptoms/Patterns are:

 

Fail 1)

Kingston 4Gb CF Card

Insert media --> Media recognised as needing formatting --> Format on recorder --> Card records okay --> Playback fails --> Eject Media --> [Go back to beginning].

 

Fail 2)

Kingston 4Gb CF Card

Insert media --> Media recognised as needing formatting --> Format as FAT32 on PC/MAC --> [Go back to beginning]

 

Fail 3)

Crucial 1 & 2 Gb CF Cards

For some reason, WAV files are not recorded properly to these cards, either with these machines or with their portable ancestor. Record anything other than WAV, all is fine. Record to WAV, and the machine crashes on any attempt to playback the material. If I recall correctly we were unable to retrieve the files from the drive if the machine got into this state *before* the card had been ejected for the first time since recording.

 

We get around Fail 3 by setting all our machines to record BWAV and rename the files on the desktop before editing. None of the editing software I've had reason to use (Amadeus II/PRO on Mac, Cubase, Reaper, Quicktime, iTunes, Audacity on Mac/Windows/Linux where available) have complained at files recorded and renamed in this manner.

 

So - has anyone else on here had similar issues and been able to get around them by any means other than simply using different media?