Sound Comparison: Tascam DR60d v BMCC EF

[Chris Barcellos]

I made this little test to show people the deficiencies of the sound on board the Black Magic Cinema Camera with current firmware 1.6. Same recording, first part with camera recorder from Tascam DR60d, second part is the DR60d recording. Added a bit of gain to the camera recording to bring it close to same level.

[Daniel Epstein]

Hey Chris,
Thanks for the test. The Tascam recording sounds much fuller the way you did the test. Not sure it is fair to loop the sound from one source to the other like you described as the Tascam outputs may give a different result than the Mic signal would coming from a mixer to both units for instance. That being said the results track from what I have heard on DSLR's compared to a separate recording.. It is hard to maximize the sound going into the BMCC without VU metering. Sounds like the BMCC has a built in Lo cut if the Tascam is actually outputting the full signal. Also don't know what level was actually recorded on BMCC so how much did you boost it to try and match.

[Chris Barcellos]

Daniel:

I have tested it both ways. Low end is definitely missing from the camera sound at present. In firmwae 1.21 it was there. Then disappeared in subsequent firmware.

[Daniel Epstein]

Since the low end has changed with firmware upgrade it probably is on purpose. Trying to avoid overload of the preamps. Should be a setting. Not sure why audio is such a challenge even at this price point.

[Chris Barcellos]

No one really knows why, except for Black Magic. In 1.21 there was a DC offset error reported by one member. There were also problems with camera jumping on it own from mic in to line in when things got to loud. Then, starting with 1.3, dc offset dlsappeared and sometime along there an now, the jumping over disappeared- at least it has not been reported by any users I know of.

Thing about it is that Black Magic Design did not report or confirm the changes in its notes, even though it is clear they did something.

[Daniel Epstein]

I guess the Beta testers for Black Magic haven't been very rigorous testing the sound. Seems like they are having trouble with programming the camera firmware properly. Of course we don't really know if they can ever really make it work the way we think it should.

[Rakesh Malik]

It seems like the beta testers are primarily in scripted narrative, so they're almost invariably using a second system for sound... hence the lack of sound tests on their part.

The fact that Resolve doesn't even acknowledge the existence of an audio track sampled at any rate other than 48KHz (hence no support for 96KHz or 192KHz sound files) indicates that Black Magic really doesn't care one whit about sound, though... unless that's changed (finally) in Resolve 11.

[Chris Barcellos]

In a post at the BBD user forum today, Kristian Lam from BMD confirmed that the loss of low end response in the camera will be addressed in the upcoming firmware update.