John Paines wrote:I had a look at your original files, and can't account for how quiet they are.
The two with the lowest recorded levels are braw.056 and the .wav file. What were these? I normalized "56" to -3 in Resolve, which added nearly 26 units of gain in the Inspector, and yet it's still very quiet (though for some reason the left channel is much stronger on this clip than the right).
the .wav is the MixPre 6 and the 56 is "3" (BMPCC4k direct (50% gain)).
The left channel is the Ohrwurm that has a bit more "power" than the Octava.
It's puzzling.... I wonder if there are lots of defective cameras out there, mine included, or if something about the process isn't being accounted for here.
Let's have a look at the whole process from a s/n ratio perspective:
1) location: how noisy is the location and how loud is the signal I want to record?
2) mic placement: How close can I get the mic to have more signal and less room tone?
3) mic pattern: A hyper cardioid would pick up less room tone than an omni capsule
4) mic noise: every mic introduces some noice of its own. Some more, some less
5) analog amplification: every stage will raise signal and noise collected so far in the chain. And it will introduce some noice of its own – depending on the number of analog stages, their quality and how good the inputs and outputs match.
6) AD conversion and recording: as we are dealing with 24bit and wav, I would not worry to much about added noise here.
7) Gain in Post: no further change in s/n ratio (I skip noise reduction for now)
Unfortunately stages 1-4 are very different in all those audio tests online. But perhaps we can try to get them at least similar. What mics do you have?
I did one more test: I plugged the Ohrwurm into the old Pocket, gain set to 50%. The meters are reading a healthy level (about -18) but the resulting file is almost as low as the BMPCC4k with 50% gain (about -30 dB). And noise floor is much higher.
In short: the old pocket looks better on its meters but has a far worse s/n ration than the BMPCC4k.
(here is the wav from the old Pocket:
https://www.net-artworks.de/download/Po ... 17.wav.zip)
Can you try the same mic on the old and the new pocket and compare the files?
Johannes