XL 1 sound problem
 

Just wondering if anyone can help me here.

Everyone has told me....clean the heads, clean the heads, which i have done.

The picture is fine but im having trouble with sound. during playback the audio misses. Not continously but its there, during playback into a TV and when i feed it through firewire. When i say it misses, i mean words are cut and when the audio reaches louder volumes, it happens more.

Can anyone help? What should i do?

Some questions to help diagnose the problem

Was the tape in question recorded in the XL1 or another camcorder?
If in the XL1, was it recorded a while ago?
Does the tape play OK in another machine?
Is the problem with both analog and digital (fiire wire) output?
Are the 'misses' always at the same point on the tape?
Is it only htis tape, or is it with other tapes as well?

It's my older tapes that seem to be working fine.

The misses are always in the same spot.

The tape does not play right through other cameras either.

I used my camera to bring into final cut another tape recorded from a different camera, and it still did it then.

What really confuses me is that the older tapes don't have the clitch in them. Just past a certain point in time this all started.

I'm not quite sure what you mean about the analog/digital thing. Its all through fire wire.

If you need to know anything else from me to help, ask away.

thanks, John

Has this xl1 ever had drum and head servicing by Canon? If not, it will likely be due now.

The video and audio dropouts that begin to occur will not self remedy by head cleaning. A fact of life. Part of the ownership of the XL1.

If the tape has a problem with other camcorders, and it is mainly this one tape, and older tapes do play OK, it sounds like it could be a tape problem, perhaps a slight flaw with the tape; e.g., slightly out of tollerance.

Depending on the hours on the camcorde, it could be due for servicing. An indicator for this is if the problme is happening with other newly recorded tapes using a different brand/lot of blank tape.

By analog output I mean output from the s-video and RCA audio output jacks. In some cases internal error correction and masking in the D-A converters (that is not applied to the firewire output) may give a usable analog signal that you could capture. The quality loss should be relatively minorl.

I may be way off the track (I don't own an XL), but a friend I knew had this problem with his XL1 (not an 's') and it appeared to be an AGC problem. It seemed the AGC didn't recover from overly loud sounds very quicky and then missed 1/2 a second or so.

Of course this doesn't account for the tape from the other camera and the fact that your camera didn't used to do it.
Did you change microphones or AGC settings at the time when the problem first surfaced?
Did you try the other camera's tape (that did have the problem) in the camera that recorded it?

Yes, it seems its time for a cleaning. I called Canon and they said that is what it sounded like, won't know for sure till they look at it.

Thanks to everybody for the help.

Cheers, John