I'm using a Sony PD170, Sennheiser ME 64 shotgun mic

I've gotten a group of audio dropouts on a couple of different tapes..
I am only recording to one channel with the Sennheiser ME 64shotgun mic, but the second unused channel will have spikes in it. At those points the audio in the used channel has blips and breaks up.

It looks like if I turn the camera off or stop recording and then start again, that the problem can clear up on it's own.

Next day... Thought it might be a tape problem at first, Just used the 3rd tape and had the same problem. I used 2 mics, (added a wireless ) shot about 20 minutes of tape - starting and stopping the camera, about 2 minutes of shooting into a new clip the audio on both mics starts to breakup.. and then got worse and worse until it stopped all together. The camera was started and stopped a couple of times. In following clips the audio broke up but then it started to work all right again.

Doesn't seem to be the mics since I'm using 2 different ones.

Any ideas of what the problem is?

how to go about troubleshooting this?

thanks
edwin

I just noticed that the video breaks up a bit as well. Waves of digital artifact move througth the video at times.

It's not always there, but that means it's a bigger problem that just the audio,, at times this problem is affecting the video as well.