Hi--

>Dave, Just got off teh phone with a Sony tech who claims that the dropout
>compensation comes before the analog OR the Firewire stage. He claims it is
>applied as the head reads the tape making the droput compensation for FW or
>analog equal. Said this would be the same for consumer or Pro machines. His
>suggestion was that there may be a RAM or hard disk accesss isssue. Mark at
>Matrox tech support is looking into it as well. For us, it's happening
>enough to make exporting files to fix them a pain in the ___.
>Rich

Hmmm...
My experience
With a TRV-9, TRV-900, or VX-1000 feeding by FW a Spark card, beeps
occured in three different computers (all with IBM deskstar drives, except
one also had IBM SCSI drives). I used to patch the beeps, so I don't know
the result of playback except with one computer with IBM UDMA drives
through a TRV-900 (the beeps from the timeline essentially disappear when
FW returned to the camera and played). With a Raptor system (same otherwise),
I have never seen a beep. I never tested to see if the beeps always happened
at the same points on the tape with re-recording to the computer (I rarely
had very many...), so I cannot say if the cause is dropouts or not (and, as
I said, there were no associated picture problems, supporting the idea
that these were not caused by dropouts [as does the Sony tech's comments]).
Do your beeps remain audible when played back through FW and out to analogue
gear?