AT wireless mic tranmitter w/ excessive current draw

Greg Cameron

Greg Cameron

Senior
Jan 11, 2011
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Hi guys. I was going to contact Audio Technica about this issue but they don't seem to have support contact other than sending in the device (which is what probably needs to happen). The local theater company here has 18 channels of AT wireless packs with micro boom headsets. One pack is draining the battery faster than the others by a good margin. I did a comparison between it and one of the others. I popped a set of band new ProCell batteries into both, set the transmitter power to high and set the sensitivity to 0dB on both with headsets connected. Then I set a timer and let them sit on my desk all day. The suspect pack's Low Batt indicator come on at 5H 52M. The "control" pack didn't kick off it's low battery indicator until 8H 15M. Pretty big discrepancy.

Now specs indicate that you get 6 hours of battery life in "High" transmitter power mode. With the mics just picking up background noise, I'd expect them to go beyond the 6 hour mark since there not amplifying much relative to use in a live performance. The suspect pack is lucky to hold out for an entire 3 hour musical I'm told by the producers. I'm curious if anyone has run into this issue before. I don't expect to be able to fix it myself, but it's an odd issue I've never run into. Seems like there's a component that sinking more current than it should. But that pack performs normally otherwise.

Thanks for any insight. For reference the AT transmitter model is ATW-310b.

Greg
 
Re: AT wireless mic tranmitter w/ excessive current draw

The AT3k series drains power like nobody's business, but I'm impressed. We just sent in a transmitter for a different repair, and it came back shiny and reasonably priced. Might as well just send it in and rent if you need to cover the channel. The AT3k series is pretty well distributed. Only test that might be worth doing is switching the mics between the two, but it seems like you've ruled that out already.
 
Re: AT wireless mic tranmitter w/ excessive current draw

Yeah, they're constantly swapping mics on these packs and the issue is consistent. Thanks Max.
 
Re: AT wireless mic tranmitter w/ excessive current draw

Hi Greg,
I once experienced a similar fault with a Shure unit. The cause on this occasion was a short circuited pixel element in the LCD display.
If it's possible to do with the AT units, remove the LCD display from the faulty unit and install it in one of the good units. (this is very easy to do with the Shure units)
If the fault moves to the good unit along with the LCD display it could well be the cause of the problem.

Good luck!

Andy
 
Re: AT wireless mic tranmitter w/ excessive current draw

Another consideration is how accurate is the low battery voltage warning? Did you pop and measure the batteries (before and after).

JR
 
Re: AT wireless mic tranmitter w/ excessive current draw

John Roberts said:
Another consideration is how accurate is the low battery voltage warning? Did you pop and measure the batteries (before and after).

JR
Click to expand...

I actually recently started measuring at what voltage the AT units like to crap out at, and it's around 1.30 - 1.35v if I'm remembering what I measured (the sheet is at the venue). I usually keep batteries above 1.44 volts because even though the battery meter only shows 40% when they come out, they still have 4-6 hours left on them.
 
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