I don't own any of the Beachtek products, but I've used several recently and haven't encountered any difficulties. I'm not meaning to bias your review, but I'm sure a lot has changed in 6 years, since Alessandro experienced his issues.

Allesandro wrote"-60, -50, -40, -20, -10, 0, +4, +10. and then the pan pot could have much more flexibility versus just a pot that handles everything from -60 to whatever it goes on the other end."

You must have the Beach Tek mixed up with something else. The Beach has always been passive, until the DXA-8 was released in Feb of this year.

The unit had a switcheable 50db pad to allow line level input and each channel is adjustable from unity to 0 . (no gain) Again the Beach has no pan control as well. Apart from acting as a passive mixer and attenuating device it also isolated balanced inputs from unbalaced connections on camera.

It serves no good purpose to make unsubstantiated negative remarks.

You still have to find the "sweet spot" on the Beachtek, do you not? We noticed that sweet spot was very narrow, if you weren't exactly dialed in, the unit would either distort the audio or not pick anything up.

Allesandro, you're talking about a passive unit. A passive unit doesn't cause distortion it only attenuates, a passive unit can't really have a so called sweet spot either.

If the knob is attenuating between +10 to -60, how much distance should that knob turn so that you can actually find the correct spot?

And it then depends on whether the pots are tapered or linear. Perhaps when the test was done in at our video club the one hidden variable was that the digital camera may not be very forgiving.

All I know is that our member, with the help of others, was having difficulty dialing in the correct audio level.

She would turn the dial one way, and the audio signal would drop out entirely, she would barely turn it the other way and the signal would be too hot and overmodulated.

My DXA-6 doesn't have pots, the pad switches 10 dB per click. You dial it in with the camera gain. Or in my case, let the AGC dial it in :-(

On teh bright side, it has 48v phantom and runs a pair of Oktavas rather nicely :-)