I've had a lot of problems with my pd170 this year. It's been to the shop twice for dropouts in both video and audio and then for a blown CCD Chip and more dropouts.

When I got the Cam back I was sure I would have no problems because I have heard so many great things about Sony's Professional Repair Center.
The cam worked well for the 1st few weddings but I started noticing 1 frame audio dropouts every 10 minutes or so and I was getting the clean heads error. I've already had my heads cleaned twice this year!

So I decided to switch from panny tapes to sony tapes to see if there would be a difference and there was. I recorded tone onto a panny tape for an hour. I cleaned the heads and did the same with a Sony tape. I studied the wave files of both tapes with Vegas and there were dropouts on the panny tape and not on the sony.

I don't know why this suddenly happened and why a cam that had been using Panasonic tapes for it's entire life would reject the same tape now. I figured if I called the Sony repair center they would have told me to try a Sony tape and they would have been right. :-)

Which Panny and which Sony? Are they comparable series of tape?

I used the Panasonic AY-DVM83PQ and the Sony Excellence 60min tapes.
Who knows if my conclusion is correct, but I have a boat load of weddings coming up, so I will notice if the drops return in editing. If they return I will have the heads replaced on cam.