XH-A1 audio quality test?

[Martin Holmes]

I’m looking to replace my venerable Sony PDX10 with one of the new crop of HDV cameras. Like many people I’m trying to decide between the Sony HVR-V1 and the Canon XH-A1.

On the whole I love my PDX10 and have got some good looking results from it but I’ve always had a problem with the poor, hissy quality of the XLR audio inputs. Apparently this stems from the fact that it uses a fixed-gain analogue stage followed by a digital attenuation stage (which is just plain crackers!) Anyway, whenever the audio is of critical importance I have to lug a DAT recorder along and then spend extra time in post getting it back in sync….which never works very well as the sync tends to drift over long runs.

Obviously I’m keen to find out how the XH-A1 fares in this regard and was wondering if any of you new owners might be able to conduct a quick test to help me make a decision.

Probably the most straight forward test would be to plug-in a decent quality levalier mic, get a good level and record some speech (mary had a little lamb..etc) Although not a very scientific test, it would be possible to get a rough idea of the noise performance and overall character of the preamps.

Anybody up for it?

Thanks for your time

Martin