I've had to de-program several folks who bought audio adapters from catalog houses.

Although my main slogan is, "Ubiquity is its own reward', my secondary slogan is "Audio is not trivial." :)

Ty Ford

Hi Ty. At the risk of over-generalising, I would say that for recording speech, 12-bit will be fine most of the time. I certainly wouldn't want to use it for miking up an orchestra though, especially at 32KHz sampling rate. If you are hearing a big difference going from 16 to 24 bit recording, I would guess you either have some very fine microphones or you need loads of headroom and are recording at low levels where the extra bits really count.

Also, a lot depends on whether the audio recording will be used in isolation or mixed with other audio. Any deficiences in an exposed track will stick out that much more.

If there is an alternative recorder available, I would definitely use it and capture the sound at 24 bits/48KHz. However, if there is no choice but to use the 4 channels on the XL2, you can still get reasonable results as long as you take care of mic placement and recording levels. (And judging by your recent long post, I would say you are very capable of getting that right.)

Richard

Richard,

Hey man. No Problem. Do what you do. Somebody asks me for help, I do the best I can to help them get the best sound possible. I presume that people want to know what the pros use so they can raise their game.

Yes, I have very good mics for location audio; Schoeps cmc641 and Sennheiser MKH 416. The folks at one of my recent seminars were jaw dropped to hear the difference between the stock camera mounted mic on a PD 150 and a Sennheiser 416. Night and day.

I don't use loads of headroom. I record at relatively high levels, which further improves the definition of the audio. A lot of sound guys and gals work that way. My Sound Devices 442 mixer has six excellent limiters; one for each input and a pair across the outputs. They catch the peaks better than any limiter I've heard. They make the mixer pretty much crash proof.

If you're recording at moderate levels into a 12-bit system, you're really probably only getting 8-bits to 10-bits. It's like recording video in low light. The results are grainey and noisy.

The bottom line for audio is, if you can't hear any difference, there isn't any. If you can, there is.

Cheers!

Ty Ford