electric hum during XL-1s playback
 

I notice in my XL-1s that there is a low-pitched electrical hum upon playback, that was not there with my XL-1. I am recording in 16 bit. Since the XL-1s is new, I had the opportunity to make a comparison. Footage recorded on the XL-1 was free of the background hum, which began exactly as footage from the XL-1s began, same tape, exactly consecutive footage, all played back on the XL-1s, same cables, same TV.
The hum is faint, but noticable. Is there any way to adjust settings to remove it?

Steve

Using the on-camera mic? Same rcording setup and venue? Perhaps the mic mount screw was too tight, resulting in coupling of transport noise to the mic body.

If the footage is important, perhaps you can low-pass filter it out in post.

Thanks Don,
I'll loosen the screw, even though it sounds like the famous repairman's suggestion to the housewife that she reverses the polarity in the appliance's plug. Looks like the low pass filter will be the way to go.

Reversing the plug did make a difference with some of the older designs before all plugs were polarized. It was especially valuable with some of the transformer-less (AC/DC) designs.

A way of reducing hum in Final Cut Pro, that I found, was to use the hum filter set at 150 hertz with the first harmonic selected. The way I found this was by blowing up the graph of the audio clip and counting the cycles of the low level hum (which were 5) for 1 frame. Times 30 (fps) gave me 150 cycles per second or hertz. I selected the first harmonic and it cut the XL1s hum almost right out of my quiet forest and bird song clip, yet other sounds remained intact. I do a lot of quiet nature stuff and I do this automatically if I am forced to use the on board microphone.