Audio Quality REDONE how bad or good is it?

[BigLu]

Id like to know how good or bad the audio quality is recorded in the REDONE.

There was a change in audio boards as some point and I am not sure if that's because the Audio quality was bad or what exactly the reason was, and what truly was changed / possibly improved.

My question is.
How good is the audio?
When recommending the REDONE for its quality in video I can answer most questions for a workflow to Producers / Directors / DPs/ and Post.

How ever, every time i get into a conversation about the REDs audio. It turns into a discussion nobody can prove to me.
Everybody has an opinion but nobody proves anything to me.
They always tell me.

"Oh I heard and I hear that the Audio is terrible from this person or that person."

Can anybody give me some real updated true quality results?

Being thats its audio and not my area of expertise
can you please explain it in terms i can explain it to Producers and Post supervisors to.

Its frustrating for me to be on one set and be with an audio guy saying oh its great its fine ive done it before, we will then record right to camera and do the entire movie in that form.

Then 2 weeks later on another set the audio guy to be recording to a Hard Disk drive and say the RED audio SUCKS I refuse to use it. I cant defend the RED because I dont know whats good whats bad.

I understand the Hard Disk drive that this professional audio guy is using has to be GREAT, sure its better than the RED i wont argue that.
But how much better is it really? What are the advantages?

Any info is appreciated.
Thanks
Luis Flores Jr

 

[jimhare]

Basically it's like this:

1. The original Red audio board was a bit noisy and weak.

2. The updated audio board is fantastic! Clean, lovely phantom with no noise.

3. There are some weird things with levels and other things that some people are saying is non-standard. This trips up recordists and leaves them scratching their head once in a while.

4. I use it to record sound ALL THE TIME. I have also used it to record sound while a sound recordist was double recording to their own high end gear. They told me the Red files sounded as good as what they recorded.

5. There are a couple of fantastic posts from a couple of weeks ago that talk about the specifics. They concluded that while the dedicated sound recording gear is technically better, you will most likely only experience the improvement if you are doing extensive audio post and need to pull stuff out of the harmonics.

In other words, if you just A/B them, they will probably sound identical.

My opinion is "sounds great, get on with it..."

 

[James Brundige]

The audio now sounds good. It is not a standard input level, so TEST with your audio gear to understand what levels work, and how Red metering relates to the other devices in the chain. If you do that, audio will be fine, and post much simpler than a double system.

 

[Tom Visser]

As an audio sound department guy, I can say that the new audio boards are pretty decent. There are a few quirks here and there, but if you perform the calibration correctly, and your sound mixer is sending proper level, the quality should be more or less indistinguishable for typical location stuff. There is some absolute quality differences, but should not be significant for most material. If you are doing something that has critical sound requirements, such as music sources, then you should consider doing double. I do advocate double system for mission critical shoots, simply because the sound mixer will have that much more control over his mix and ISO tracks and use the onboard audio for scratch tracks, for dailies and editorial synch backup.