Posted by Mark & Mary Ann Weiss on 07/10/07 08:48

> i have to say, following this thread, that peoples expectation of a $5k
> camera is almost farcical in it's hysteric's....
>
> i have a v1 (having come thru to it via a career in broadcast tv
> equipment), and i have to say that yes, the sound is pretty basic, that
> yes, they crippled the practicality of separate input levels from one
> mic input, buy hey, what did you expect, 96hz audio recording?

No, I expected audio that's at LEAST as good as my $2000 VX2000 video
camera. And it's not unreasonable to expect the audio on a $4800 camera with
XLR balanced, phantom-powered jacks to be almost as good as a $200 hand held
recorder.

The fact is, this is a DIGITAL recorder, and as such, it's pretty hard to
introduce non-linearity in a normally-linear digital audio system. There is
no technical reason why the camera audio should not be flat to 5Hz. Heck,
I'd even be okay with -1dB @20hz. But -32.7dB @20Hz is a sign of something
seriously wrong. Even analog taperecorders do better than this.

Listen to the comparison files of on-location audio I recorded with both the
$4800 V1U and a $200 cheap hand-held portable recorder here, under the
orange paragraph:
http://www.basspig.com/CameraAudioTests.htm

> as for pointing fingers at 'pre-release' testers, i have yet to read any
> mis or disinformation from any of them. then again, i doubt that any
> professional cameraman would record anything serious with any of this
> class of camera. it's fine for run and gun, vox pop talking heads, etc.,
> but in no way would you record any 'commercial' audio on it. that's why
> there is a plethora of out board recorders available.....

I record symphony orchestras, and for that I use a truckload of high end
digital recording gear. But last month I was at a parade where I had to be
mobile and could not cart around a wheelbarrow load of storage batteries,
inverters and digital recording systems. It would have been nice if the
audio quality from my pair of Neumann U87s were not so godawfully decimated
by the low- and mid-cut filtering in the V1U.

I learned my lesson on that one and now carry around this kludge of a camera
with a digital recorder permanently bolted to the top of it. It looks
rediculous and draws a lot of eyeballs in public places, and it's a PitA to
have to deal with synching and downloading all the extra files in
postproduction, but until Sony fixes this joke of an audio system, I and
others will have to live with the inconvenience, that I thought I would be
free of by choosing the V1U over the FX7.



> come on, get a life and shoot like a pro, and stop moaning about crappy
> audio that you should have discovered before buying - i hired a v1 and
> put it through all that i thought i might throw at it before buying.
> sound WAS a disappointment - but i was buying a video camera, not an
> audio recorder....

Unfortunately, there was no rental available here, so I could not pre-test.
Anyway, it has a digital recording system, and everyone knows digital is
flat from DC to Nyquist. Sony must have deliberately neutered the audio on
this camera for marketing reasons. I can think of no way you can screw up a
digital recording system other than to intentionally and at considerable
cost, add in components to introduce nonlinearity. I'll bet that it would
cost LESS to make the audio flat, than it costs to put in this bell curve
filter.

You people that think a camera shouldn't have good audio need to get into
the 21st century with your thinking. This isn't analog tape with linear
track audio anymore! Digital is flat from DC to half the sample rate clock.
These vestiges of old are built in insults to us all.

Mark Weiss, P.E.
http://www.basspig.com/hvrv1u_HDV_artifacts.htm

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