When it comes to videomaking it doesn’t matter how crisp and beautiful your images are if your audio quality is not up to par. Bad audio ruins everything. Most viewers can perhaps tolerate a so so image quality as long as the audio is decent, but rarely, or never, have any patience with substandard audio.

The single best thing you can do to avoid bad audio quality is to stop using the internal mics on your camcorder or vdslr and instead attach a decent external microphone (more on mics in a future post). The problem, however, is that most consumer/prosumer camcorders none of the vdslrs don’t have xlr inputs and phantom power, and more often than not suffer from rather noisy preamps.

There are two ways around this problem. You can either get yourself a good portable recorder such as the Zoom H4n, or you can buy a XLR camcorder adapter/preamp like the Juicedlink CX231 or the Beachtek Dxa-6.

I have included a few links below to reviews and comparisons with audio samples of a handfull good portable recorders for up to around 600USD. The smallest of these do lack XLR inputs and phantom power, however, so they might not necessarily be the best choice for you. We at Comrade Ape already have the Sony PCM-D50 lying around (initially bought it for radio production) which is a very solid recorder with very low noise levels. It does lack XLR and phantom power, though. There is an adapter from Sony, but that will set you back about 500USD, roughly the same price as for the recorder itself. Instead we are planning to buy the Juicedlink CX231, which retails for around 300USD. This will serve both as an XLR adapter for the PCM-D50 as well as a preamp/mixer for our Canon HFS100.

Now that was the best choice for us, since we already owned the Sony. If we were to make that choice today, however, we would probably go for either the Zoom H4n portable recorder, or just the Juicedlink.

Transom review of the Olympus LS-10
Transom review of the Zoom H2
Transom review of the Marantz PMD 620
Transom review of the Sony PMC-D50
Transom review of the Marantz PMD 661
Transom review of the Tascam DR-series
Transom review of the Zoom H4n
Wildlife Sound Recording Society review of the Fostex FR2LE

Portable recorder noise test at wingfield audio.

Compare mic adapters at wingfield audio.