DPReview recently put out a video where they compare
the preamps from a bunch of popular hybrid systems.
In their tests, the Sony a7 III did horribly,
and was significantly worse than the rest
when it comes to signal to noise ratio.
Since that video came out, I've received dozens of requests
for me to comment on that result,
and today that's exactly what I'm gonna do.
Let's get undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening, everybody? I'm Gerald Undone, and...
[soft whoosh]
Alright, so I've got two cameras in front of me here:
the S1H, which that DPReview video found
to be the best preamps of the lot,
and the Sony a7 III, which was clearly the worst.
Let's pull up a clip from the video in question,
so you can hear the results they got on the S1H
and the a7 III for noise.
[man] Wash your hands often to stay healthy.
You can help yourself and your loved ones stay healthy
by washing your hands often,
especially during these key times
when you are likely to get and spread germs.
Now, as many of you pointed out, something sounds wrong
with that a7 III; I record internally on Sony all the time,
and I definitely would have made a video about it by now if
I thought it sounded that bad, But let's do some testing.
So, connecting to each of the cameras,
I have the same microphone,
which is the RØDE VideoMic NTG.
And both are set to the same gain-knob setting of 7.
For the camera settings, I have the gain turned down
almost all the way. On the Sony,
that means setting the gain to 1,
because 0 is off and records nothing.
And on the S1H, I have the gain set to -12dB and the low option.
This camera can go down to -18dB, though,
and we'll test that afterwards. But I put it at -12,
because it more closely matched the output of the Sony.
And the other Panasonic cameras can't go any lower than -12,
like the S1 and the GH5,
so I thought this was more a fair test.
And then I just press record on each of the cameras
and record the audio internally to an SD card.
[louder] And if talk a little bit louder,
then we hit -12 right on. That's using -12dB
on the low setting on the S1H,
and using 1 volume on the Sony-- that's as low as the Sony goes.
Uh, so here's a little bit of silence
to check out the noise level.
[soft room din]
[voice raised] And if talk a little bit louder,
then we hit -12 right on. That's using -12dB
on the low setting on the S1H,
and using 1 volume on the Sony-- that's as low as the Sony goes.
Uh, so here's a little bit of silence
to check out the noise level.
[soft room din]
So, the first thing you're gonna notice here
is the giant disparity between the two cameras,
that DPReview captured, is gone.
In fact, if I look a little closer
and measure the loudness of the noise sections,
we find the S1H is actually about two dB noisier
than the a7 III. And, personally,
as much as I like the S1H's preamps,
and I agree with DPReview that they're excellent,
I think the a7 III sounded a little bit better here,
at least on my voice, offering a bit of a richer sound
and more clarity, in my opinion. Now let's try it again,
but giving the Sony a slight disadvantage.
Normally I record with the Sony set to 5,
which could potentially introduce more noise
if the preamps are really that terrible.
And let's turn the S1H down all the way to its -18dB setting.
The Sony a7 III is set to 5 on the gain.
And the microphone is also set to 5,
and the Panasonic S1H is set to -18 low.
And the microphone is set to 10.
The Sony a7 III is set to 5 on the gain.
And the microphone is also set to 5,
and the Panasonic S1H is set to -18 low.
And the microphone is set to 10.
I'll leave a moment of silence so that we can hear
what the noise sounds like, starting now.
[soft room din]
Surprisingly, I found the results to be the same
as my last test: the Sony sounded better,
and still came in two dB quieter for noise.
I do like that the S1H allows
for such a low gain setting, though.
Being able to go down to the low preamp
with with the 18dB is great,
but the Sony at 5 gain still sounded fantastic.
Now let's turn the microphones down to 2 on their gain knobs,
and then increase the in-camera gains,
until we hit around -12dB on their meters.
Both microphones are set to 2 on their gain,
which is relatively low for these RØDEs.
And then the Sony, I've increased the gain
until I get that -12 level, which makes me put
the record level at around 12 on the Sony.
And then over on the Panasonic, I had to switch it up
to standard from low, and set the gain to...
It won't let me access the menu while I'm recording,
but I'm pretty sure I had to set it to -5dB?
So, here's just me talking again, and then I'll give you
a little bit of silence so we can check out the noise.
[soft room din]
Again, the results remain consistent: even when taxing
the preamps more, the Sony is still 2dB quieter,
and produces a richer tone with more clarity.
By the way, all the clips were normalized the same way
using Audition and targeting -16dB LUFS.
But even before normalization, the same observations
I made are present. Just requires you
to turn your volume up on your headphones to hear them.
Also, off-camera, I did this test three times and tried
swapping things out to make sure the results were consistent.
So, I tried each mic on each camera and with each cord,
and the results were always the same.
But before we wrap this video, there are a few things
I want you to consider. First, many aspects
of sound quality are subjective.
You may like the way one camera sounds better
on your voice and microphone more than another.
And for other people, in varied listening situations,
they might not even hear a difference.
For me, I prefer the sound of the Sony in this situation,
but I wouldn't consider the difference between the two
to be big enough to talk about,
if I wasn't directly replying to that DPReview video.
But some aspects are not subjective, like measured noise.
And in this case, the Sony a7 III
was objectively less noisy in each scenario,
which leads me to the conclusion that something either went wrong
with the Sony test in the DPReview video,
or something is faulty on their particular a7 III.
But I'd still like to commend DPReview on their video,
because I think tests like that are useful resource,
and not a lot of channels are doing them.
And there's a lot of valuable information
in that video for people that wanna learn more
about how their cameras record sound.
I'm not making this video to rip on DPReview. I love those guys.
I just wanted to calm your concerns that your Sony camera
was an awful choice for audio recording,
because it's not. It's perfectly fine.
And in my tests, it's slightly better than even the S1H.
But that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found this video
entertaining, or at least helpful, and if you did,
make sure you leave it the old thumbs-up
and consider subscribing if you haven't already.
But if you did not find this video helpful
or entertaining, try setting your playback speed to 75%.
Alright... I'm done.