Hard to believe two years have passed already, but we’ve circled the sun twice and it’s time for another Guitar Flangdang here in Walnut Creek. This is the ninth time we’ve hosted a get together for builders and fans of fine handmade guitars and as always it was a blast. (more…)
At first glance evaluating audio gear seems like it should be perfectly simple, all we need to do is trust our ears. But it turns out that we don’t hear with our ears, we hear with our brain and with the nervous system circuitry between our ears and brain, all in a wildly complex network of sensing, filtering, focusing, and feeding back. And this network is both amazingly sophisticated and hilariously inept at the same time, able to discriminate between small differences but also certain to occasionally make up the answers. (more…)
While the folks on the high end forum at Gearslutz may debate the relative merits of multi-thousand dollar a/d converters, I suspect that most of us home recordists feel that consumer level a/d and d/a does the job. We’re a lot more likely, though, to ascribe big differences to microphones, looking to different mics for different sources, different tonal flavors, different styles of music. But really, how much difference will we hear if we choose between two very different mics? (more…)
I had a lot of fun the other day shooting a self-duet video but I ran into a couple of snags trying to use the Zoom H6 metronome and overdub functions. Perhaps my experiences can help you out. (more…)
I don’t overdub, or at least I do it only very rarely. And I’ve never done a project using the overdub capability of the Zoom H6. But I do know that the capability exists and I’ve tested it briefly.
When an H6 user from the UK posted on the Sound on Sound Forum that he was having a problem overdubbing because phantom power was not available, I did a quick test and learned that my unit exhibits the same issue. (more…)
Talk about an unfair fight, this seems to be just that, based on price alone. The GH3 currently costs around $850 (Ooops, today it’s $1000 – camera prices have become highly variable it seems) for the body only, the original price was about $1300 with a kit zoom lens. The Q4 at $299 is a lot easier to fit into most budgets. And we’re talking about a very specific niche here, the “music camera,” in this category the audio quality is right up there in importance with the video. (more…)
I started shooting video with a low end SD tape camcorder and the results were mediocre at best. I spent a lot of energy trying to get better quality with that system, but my videos were still pretty homely until I got my hands on a Flip Mino, which brought HD video to a camera that fit in the shirt pocket and cost about $100. But with the pace of technology the Flip and similar products were soon overwhelmed by the smart phone revolution and it seemed like nearly everyone had an HD video camera in their pocket. The market for dedicated pocket HD video cameras dried up overnight.
The folks at Zoom figured out a niche product, though, that let them charge a premium for a little plastic lens camera – they put good microphones and clean audio processing in the package and marketed it to their existing customers, musicians. (more…)
I’ve been using my Panasonic Lumix GH3 as my main video cam for the last year or so and it’s a terrific tool. The articulated display, live HDMI out, high bitrate codecs, WIFI connectivity, and luscious image quality have made it my favorite shooter. But I’ve avoided using camera audio even though the GH3 does have some intriguing audio features. (more…)