iPhone 7 Audio Broken by High-End Setup


My lovely wife has become something of an expert shooting video with her iPhone. She has experimented with many audio solutions over the years. Currently she uses a pre-amp that lets her use inputs from several different audio sources. One configuration is one or two lavaliere mics and a hand-held wireless microphone. All these feed into the pre-amp which then feeds the audio to the iPhone. The objective is to keep the audio and video in sync. Trust me, we’ve both spent way, way too much time synchronizing audio and video tracks during the last year. Luckily, some of our expertise was acquired via contract work, so we at least got paid a bit.  This is our tale of iPhone 7 Audio Broken by High-End Setup.

Here’s the problem. Neither of her pre-amps work with the iPhone 7. The problem seems to be with the Lightning to 3.5 mm jack converter cable. But it’s hard to tell.  (This seems to be an ongoing issue with the iPhone 7.  Click here to read the most comprehensive discussion we’ve found.)

TASCAM pre-amps iPhone 7 Breaks High-End Audio Setup

The pre-amps are both TASCAM, models DR-60 and DR-701D (see above). She connects them to the iPhone via a Sennheiser KA 600i adapter cable.

We have no idea what is causing the problem. I have posted requests for help to Sennheiser, TASCAM, and the appropriate Apple discussion board. I will post replies here as they come in. If you know something about this, please either leave a comment or send me an e-mail.


About Tony Lima

Tony Lima has been working with technology, economic modeling, forecasting, and market research for 40 years. His background makes him uniquely qualified to navigate this varied landscape. Begin with his education: B.S. in chemical engineering from M.I.T. , M.B.A. from Harvard, Ph.D. in economics from Stanford. His day job was professor of economics at California State University, East Bay. He retired in 2016 to devote his time to consulting and writing. But he has found time to: write (eight books and over 100 articles ranging from wine economics to detailed analyses of meta-language code generators) consult with companies ranging from Microsoft to CEDEX keep his expertise up-to-date, constantly reading and sorting through the avalanche of information available daily maintain three blogs: Wine Research, Wine Economics, and Economic Policy Local policy analysis: Los Altos Politico.com

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