On 26 Jan 2000 04:59:35 GMT, "John P. Beale" wrote:

>Making a very casual recording of a piano with the built-in microphones of
>my GL1 over the weekend, I encountered some very unpleasant distortion on
>the peaks. It sounded like noise was modulating the peaks of the louder
>passages, as if an analog stage was being severely overloaded. I was very
>surprised, since
>
>1) this was a normal, unamplified, upright acoustic piano played at a
>normal level. I was about 3 feet away from the keyboard. It sounded fine,
>live. I was moving around so there was a little background noise.
>
>2) Many people including me have commented how the GL1 built-in mics sound
>quite good. And they have, in my previous tests.
>
>I put up a few seconds of MP3 recording if you want to hear how bad it was:
>
> http://www.bealecorner.com/trv900/mictest/piano2.mp3
>
>this was taken from a firewire playback from the MiniDV tape (48kHz),
>converted to 44.1 kHz using best quality interpolation in CoolEdit96, and
>encoded by MusicMatchJukebox4 at CBR 128 kb/sec (CD quality). Digital all
>the way, no analog steps outside the camera. I've done a number of audio
>pieces this way and never heard any distortion, let alone something as bad
>as this.
>
>Any ideas? What could have happend?

A few comments:
--The audio of the GL-1 I tried was not very flat - it
sounded somewhat "pre-EQ'd" to sound good on the usual
bad TV speakers, since both the bass and treble are
boosted relative to the mid-range (most TV built-in
speakers are quite strong in the mid-range, and very
weak near the frequency extremes). On a good, wide-range
audio system, the rather pronounced "color" of the
GL-1 sound is quite evident (a "sizzle-boom" balance,
with a mid-range "suck-out" is quite audible, especially
on noise like rushing water, wind, traffic-noise, etc.).
--The piano is a percussion instrument, which can produce
very high momentary peak levels which can rise faster in
level than the limiting/compression circuits may be
designed to handle (for good reason - fast compression
sounds terrible with most sound material...).
--You may want to check through the audio track visually to
see if the "clipping" is real, or if it occurs elsewhere
in the audio chain - if the latter, you can reduce the
overall level, manually reduce the peaks, or compress
the audio while editing. If the material is important,
and it is "clipped" in the original, CoolEdit96 is a
good program to use to smooth the clipped parts
manually so they are less obvious and annoying.