Sennheiser G3 100 lav setup for Sony Z5

[Tom Morrow]

Originally Posted by Steve House

What preamps are you referring to? The G3's preamps would be in the transmitter, not the receiver, but it's the receiver output that one needs to match to the camera's input.
It's my understanding that G3 receiver output settings <0 are attenuating the nominal signal down, not reducing the gain. Nominal output level on the receiver would be with the output set 0 in the menu.

I was referring to the amplifer stage in the g3 receiver. It's called AF OUT in the menu. I typically leave it at 0 to get a hot mic level signal, rather than setting it to +12 to get a line level signal. YMMV.

[Steve House]

Originally Posted by Richard Crowley

Absolutely true. But there are no cameras commonly used by people here that have TRUE line level inputs. They all have balanced inputs that are kludged between mic level and line level, either with simple internal pads, or (sometimes) including change of input stage gain. The Z5 likely has only a simple internal switched pad.

Several sources claim that that's where the term "pro-sumer" comes from: professional image quality with consumer audio inputs.

[John Willett]

Originally Posted by Richard Crowley

Absolutely true. But there are no cameras commonly used by people here that have TRUE line level inputs. They all have balanced inputs that are kludged between mic level and line level, either with simple internal pads, or (sometimes) including change of input stage gain. The Z5 likely has only a simple internal switched pad.

Then it's best to not use any pad on the camera at all and adjust the output level of the receiver to match.

As I said, it's bad to pad down and boost up again - so if the camera only has a mic. input that is padded down to accept line level (yuk), then I think I would have to (reluctantly) use the mic. level.

[Steve House]

Originally Posted by Tom Morrow

I was referring to the amplifer stage in the g3 receiver. It's called AF OUT in the menu. I typically leave it at 0 to get a hot mic level signal, rather than setting it to +12 to get a line level signal. YMMV.

If you're setting the receiver menu output to 0 and still need set the camera inputs to "mic" to get adequate recording levels, I suspect you're setting your transmitter sensitivity too low and are under-modulating. Remember that voice peaks should cause the AF Peak LED to flicker. Sennheiser's specs for the G3 state that the receiver puts out +11dBu when it receives a fully-modulated signal of a 1kHz tone. The Z5 specs claim its mic level sensitivity is -48dBu so you've got to pad the receiver output down quite a bit to get a good match.