Hi all,

I took the AX2000 to the Indian River County Fair today. I was using the XLR mike from my HVR-V1U (with mike trim set at +12), which was working great when I tested it at home.

I got to the fair and the assignment I was there to shoot - the motorcycle show - was in the breezeway where the main entertainment stage was. Not only that, the wind was whipping at gusts of about 30 mph. I tried to get the main person I interviewed away from the blaring band on stage, which meant taking him behind the stage into the whipping wind. I had my trusty dead cat on the mike, but that didn't help at all.

In the main interview, it sounds to me like the mike is clipping. I was watching the sound levels in the viewfinder and I didn't see them holding in the red. I saw the levels touch red briefly a couple of times, but as you can hear, this seemed to be continuous clipping. Can someone listen and confirm for me? I set the gain for the mike at about 8, which is the same setting I use on the V1U. Like I said, the mike sounded fine at home with my settings. But I guess the background noise of the loud music and wind affected the quality more than I thought they would.

I kept the camera on auto exposure and shot at the highest-quality SD. I can tell I'm going to need to practice a lot with this camera before I begin to get comfortable with it.

Videos: Motorcycle show at Indian River County Fair - Treasure Coast, FL | TCPalm.com (http://www.tcpalm.com/videos/detail/motorcycle-show-indian-river-county-fair/)

Not sure how similar the AX2000 is to the NX5U. On the NX5U there is an audio limit switch in the menu that limits clipping when audio is in manual control. The other thing to look at is the gain trim which on the NX5U can be set at -18,-12,-6,0,+6,+12 to match the mic sensitivity. The default is 0. If your mic is a mono shotgun you may want to set one channel to manual and the other to auto gain fed from the same mic or set the two channels at different levels as a backup.

Ron Evans

Well, I did some more tests today at home, using the same settings I had while at the fair.

The wind was gusting like it was on Saturday. I "interviewed" my mom in my front yard. I then changed the audio trim to 0 and re-interviewed her.

Both times the voice sounded normal, except that with the audio trim at 0, the voice was obviously more faint. The wind noise was minimal with the wind muff on.

So it seems that the loud music plus wind at the fair were the reasons for the clipping in the sound. I'm glad my mike isn't defective. If I go back to the fair this week, I think I will be pulling out my lavalier mike.