When recording in HD is I higher quality of sound being producd as when you shoot in SD? I have only used the camera for HD project and have neve actually shot in SD.

no. Same bit rate In SD or HD

SD records uncompressed audio, HDV records MPEG1 Layer 2 audio, so SD should be better in this respect.

Richard

I stand corrected. Richard is correct on this.

Yeah .. HDV sound is 384K MPEG-1 Layer 2

Richard & Takey, so does this mean that the sound on SD is actaully better than the sound that gets recorded in HDV?

I would say so but I don't think people in general will notice the difference.

I agree with Taky. There's so many other factors that screw up the sound (e.g. mic type, mic placement, hum pickup on cables, background sounds, etc) before it reaches the audio codec, you're unlikely to hear the difference in normal use.

Richard

Once you get a perfect sound on HDV you could then move up/down and make the sound perfecter in DV.... but... the picture?
You can fine tune the sound onto HDV with experiments in sending volume and listening for compression effects in auto level mode... or ride your levels hot, but not too hot in manual mode.

As an old audio guy new to video, I did a lot of audio testing when I first got my XH A1. (Shooting 1080i HDV)

I initially recorded live events with AKG 451 mikes into the A1, and an assortment of other mikes into 24/48K PCM digital recorders with Apogee MiniMe Mike pre’s/ adc’s. (even tried 24/96K).

With a wide range of mikes, I compared numerous stereo pair sound sources in a studio, again based on Apogee DAC’s and Genelec speakers. To my great surprise, I could not find any quality difference between any of the high end recording solutions and just two mikes plugged into the XH A1! At that point I stopped lugging around a lot of excess audio gear.

I now record into a Sound Devices 788T, but only for multi track capability.