Sony Head phones for Sony PMW EX1

You already read what I think.

Use a hyper indoors.
Strap a MixPre around the boom op's neck, and use a break-away cable that allows both the boom op and the camera op to hear the camera's audio. A MixPre is even more important on a low budget film because you will be un-clipable after you calibrate to the camera. It costs a lot more to fix bad audio than to buy a mixer. But do what you want to. You'll either learn from other's mistakes or you'll learn from your own.
 
Jason mentioned 'boutique' mic preamps and A/D converters..
These are essentially vastly over-priced 'ego boosters' for recording engineers. As Jason pointed out, their s/n is often poor. Their main purpose is to 'color' the sound (distort it, in other words) in ways that are aesthetically pleased to some recording engineers and pop stars.

These mic preamps are NOT high fidelity. Quite literally, you will get more transparent sound from a LM1458 op-amp and a couple of resistors on a breadboard. There is no need to spend $2,000 on a preamp when numerous inexpensive plug ins are available for most DAWs that replicate these effects through "modeling" of the transfer functions.

My friend Ethan Winer, gave a lecture at the AES last year on 'Audio Myths' and this was one of the topics (I was covering the event on video).

The audio world is full of 'snake oil' salesmen. Watch out for the Michael Fremers of the world who claim you need a $2,400 Valhalla power cord for your amplifier "to open up the transparency of the sound". They are prevelent on the high end audiophile market, but also have made inroads in the pro audio market in the past ten years.

Tubes have one attribute that people seem to like: when driven to clipping (which you should never do on ANY device, unless it's a guitar amp and as an effect), tubes have a more gradual cutoff that is harmonically-related to the pitch of the sound passing through the amplifier stage, being dominant in the 2nd, or even harmonics. Solid state amplifiers, when overdriven will clip abruptly and the result is odd-order harmonics which are dissonant to the pitch being clipped.

Most every A/D converter today is of good quality. Even the one in the EX1/3 is good enough that I was able to record Classical chamber music with it and there was really no discernable difference between that recording and other recordings I did with a high end A/D converter and mic preamps. The EX series is the FIRST camera system I have worked with that has a decent audio system on-board. If you've read my rants 3 years ago about the Sony HVR-V1U, then you know I don't pull punches when something's not up to digital performance standards.


Lucere, when you change audio levels, change the Attenuator levels in the audio menu, but leave the dials "rec volume" on 5-1/2 to 6. That is where the 'gain staging' of the cameras' preamp and downline amplifiers is matched. Any higher and you will just raise your noise floor and clip sooner. Any lower and you will clip your mic preamp, but never reach 0dBfs on the digital recording. It's more work, but it's the best way to do this and take full advantage of the camera's un-weighted 89dB dynamic range. In filmmaking, it is rare that the dynamic range on set will exceed 50dB, so the camera has headroom to burn, if you know how to utilize it.
 
Nobody complains about the audio quality that I get from the EX1. Heck, I use it as my go-to recorder for voiceover work if I don't want to drive to the recording studio. Shure SM7b, set audio dials to 5 or 6, attenuate at 55 or whatever the second from the last highest number and I'm there. Beautiful sounding audio.

The few times I've recorded live music I was happy with the built-in mic. One time I took board audio. Good stuff. http://vimeo.com/11290272 - Taking the output of a cheap mixer through a wireless signal to the EX1. http://vimeo.com/10171800 - Wired shotgun mic for interview audio. All my mouse fart recordings are done at the recording studio. ;-)
 
basspig and/or adamr316,

Have you listened to any of the 24bit uncompressed audio out of the EX1 to Nanoflash? Can you hear any difference with that? (I'm a little hard of hearing so I have to rely on others for audio opinions.)

Thanks.
 
Duke, i don't know that one with even perfect hearing would hear a difference between 16 & 24 bit. The 24 bit benefit is that there is more headroom, making it a safer bet to record at lower volumes without having the noisefloor as high. A recording at a good level will sound the same in both 16 & 24. A recording at a very low level will sound less noisy in 24. This is helpful especially in post when one often needs to turn up very quiet passages, revealing the noise. Having that extra headroom may save some quiet passages from needing noise reduction.
 
Duke, the advantage of 24-bit quantizing is that you have more 'steps' on the 'staircase' that defines the signal voltages of the audio program material. It really isn't any quieter (that's more a function of microphone and preamp self-noise). What 24-bits gets you is the ability to stretch a portion of the dynamic range (normalizing is usually done to bring low audio levels up to some prescribed reference loudness) without running into granularity problems.

In video, this is akin to the 'banding' or posterizing effect you get when you stretch 24-bit color by trying to open up dark tones too much. If the color depth were 30-bit, the banding would be far less prevalent. With audio, if you're working in a 16-bit editor, then normalizing will produce increasing amounts of harmonic distortion as you boost small signals to full-scale.

I did some experimenting with 16, 24 and 32-bit float mode editing, to find out just what the effects are. Using 16-bit sources, I recorded a 400hz sine wave. Then I reduced it to -90dB via digital editing. Then I tried the following, first in 16-bit, then 24 and finally 32-bit float: reopen the file and normalize the -90dB sine wave to 0dBfs. The 16-bit editing mode produced a two-step square wave having 5th order harmonic distortion at -21dB and rich in hundreds of other odd-order harmonics at lesser, but significant levels. The 24-bit file had harmonics way up the hundredth order range at -78.1dB and still looked like a perfect sine wave. 32-bit would be several orders of magnitude better than that, even.
IOW, you can record with your levels down around -90dB in 24-bit and suffer no AUDIBLE artifacts from normalizing that audio in a 24-bit float editor. Doing so on a 16-bit audio system would result in gross harmonic distortion. That is why it is important to bracket your recording levels so that the loudest expected sound is just short of digital clipping, making use of the full dynamics offered by 16-bits (96dB).
 
Lucere said:
I have also owned the Sony MDR V600 for years. I only chose them because that's what the guy at the camera store suggested, back when...

I'm a few weeks away from a very, very low-budge horror film project- Sony EX1 with Nanoflash and intend to use the camera to capture the film's audio, with a shotgun mic. Would anyone advise that I'd be better off getting the Sennheiser HD-25 mkII, Sony 7506 or 7509 rather than being okay using what I have? If so can you please state why? Thanks!
Click to expand...

i used to have the Sennheiser HD-25's. AMAZING!!! GREAT!!! best ive ever used. im talking studio/audio use here. lightweight, serious isolating of exterior noise, always felt pretty honest as far as what my brain would think of as linear. very smooth but still incredibly articulate top end compared to the more sizzly and hyped 7506's. 7506's do go loud though, great for a pounding drummer playing to a click track. 7506's are for sure overhyped and i would never mix to them or make serious EQ judgements... but very useful in the studio for tracking when the player wants loud. dont get me wrong i appreciate the 7506's but the Sennheiser's are a much better listenting experience. also the only headphones that i felt i could actually do a mix on vs speakers...but still never did...lol!

now the good and bad on the HD-25's. the wires are designed to "pull out/release" from the ear cups. so over time they got pulled out so much by sloppy players by stepping on the cord that eventually they wouldnt stay in very good and even the slightest moves would cause them to come out. i finally super glued them but then the cord broke and i never bothered to replace them.

the 7506's would be more reliable over time i think. many times i wear headphones when using my EX1 and using my Steadicam since i am monitoring lavs or shotguns. wouldnt have a hand free to plug the cable back in in the middle of a take. HD-25 are more of a risk here.

hands down the HD-25's are very impressive and satisfying when it come to "feel" on your head and "sound" quality/experience.

david
www.davidprobst.com
 
I had recorded a piano recital on the afternoon of Memorial Day this week and while monitoring on headphones, I was hearing some muddled crunchiness in the F-sharp range of the piano above middle C. It seemed to less when I lowered the headphone volume.
When I listened to this recording in the studio on a high end sound system last night, I could clearly hear that there was something rattling inside the piano at that frequency. The headphones just didn't have the accuracy to reproduce all the subtleties of the sounds that the studio sound system did. I regard headphones as a necessary evil, in monitoring situations, but they're no match for really good speakers, when it comes to accurately recreating sound of the original performance. Last night's listening session was so much more opulant, transparent and dynamically-stunning, that it served to remind me of this fact in spades.
 
Yes headphones are a necessary evil. I thoroughly adore my JBL LSR-4328PPAK nearfields. so rich and full sounding with smooth yet articulate highs...

Hey if you need that rattling removed I can do it with my iZotope RX software. That stuff is practically magic.

Spectral Repair - Replace
Guitar squeeks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Vjlj7o-p1U

Spectral Repair - Attenuate
Car brakes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbFe73nDNRU

It's an awesome little app for 314.00 street. There's also hum, hiss, click, and even clipping removal.
 
hi chad,

are you referring to the "iZotope RX" package? are both "replace & attenuate" in this package?

do you run it as a stand alone program or with with an editing program like pro tools?

will it bring in "stereo & mono" tracks only as a stand alone version? stand alone is not multitrack is it?

great looking software. it would be cool to have in protools but it would also be cool to do some simple fixes without having to have my digi interface hooked up like out of town with only my laptop.

any pro and cons to this?

thanks for this info.

david
www.davidprobst.com
 
I have not tried it as a plug-in. I use cubase and it seemed complicated, but I didn't put much time into it. I have used it a lot as stand alone and it basically saved a feature length film I was handed. Te location audio was terrible with creaky wooden floors, boom handling noise, distorted & clipped audio, 60 cycle hum, low rumble - all fixed with RX.

There is only one version of RX and it has everything, under 5 categories: Declipper, Declicker, Hum Removal, Denoiser, and Spectral Repair.

This video covers it all: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im2b--e7xCA Note that there is no audio for 40 seconds. Its not a mistake, there is just no VO.
 
BASSPIG:

We begin shooting this weekend. It's been quite a journey getting sets, actors and props together, but we are finally there.

I believe I followed your advice properly (yesterday finally :) and set the audio input dial to 5 1/2, but then had to set Trim to -65 in order to get sufficent gain. There was quite a bit of noise in the resulting signal. However, setting the input dial to 10 and Trim to 47, resulted in a cleaner signal. Do you have any thoughts, or could you please offer some guidence?

THANKS!!
 
The only reason why it might be necessary to go to -65dB attenuator gain would be if using a dynamic microphone. I would strongly advise against using a dynamic mic (output level in the -65dB range) because there are only a few preamps in the world that are quiet enough to work with such mics. And I don't think it makes sense to spend $20,000 on a mic preamp to achieve what you could with a $500 condenser mic and an attenuator setting of -35dB.

If you are using a phantom powered condenser mic with -65dB attenuator gain, then you have cut your dynamic range to a very poor level. Anything louder than a mouse fart will clip the input stage at this gain setting! On top of having reduced your headroom to pathetic levels, you've pushed the noise floor of the mic pre all the way up near the ceiling on the next amplifier stage.

Anything past 5-1/2 on the REC gain is just raising the noise floor. Clipping already occurs at 0dB at this dial setting, so setting it ANY higher just reduces the ceiling for louder sounds and raises the noise floor.

I'd guess that with the gain at 10 and the atten at -47, the total gain is less than with the gain at 5-1/2 and the atten on -65. That's why you heard less hiss. But it's the wrong direction to go with the settings. It might sound less noisy, but when someone shouts and it clips, it's going to be a big downer.

For dialogue with phantom-powered condenser mics, -35dB should be about right. I think the problem is you're thinking "old school" where the levels had to hover around 0VU all the time, because the old systems had 35dB s/n ratio on linear tape at 1-7/8IPS. Put that paradigm out of your mind. The new paradigm is it's fine if the dialogue peaks at -20dB.

Let me relate a little anecdote: I was recording a documentary (without my headphones) for a pyrotechnic company earlier this month and I forgot to check that Phantom power was turned on for BOTH channels on my Rode NT4. Failing to do this, the one channel of +48V wasn't enough current to charge up both mic elements (which share phantom power), so I didn't get any audio--or so I thought. In post production, I normalized the audio and found my audio was FIFTY dB down I recovered it, put 10dB of Steinberg DeNoiser on it, and it sounded better than the audio I got from my Sony VX2000 at full 0VU recording levels. The objective of this story is: don't worry about your levels being "too low" with the EX1. The preamps are still quieter than just about any production condenser mic in existence today. Gaining up may give the illusion that you've made everything louder, but you actually have given up dynamic range (headroom).
 
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