Is there a significant quality difference when using a recorder?

[Jeremy Wiles]

I know the preamps in the Epic are not great, so I'm using a Sound devices 442 mixer. How much better audio will I get by adding a professional recorder like the Sound Devices 744T in combination with my mixer?

Thanks,

Jeremy

 

[ericyoung]

The noise floor will be much better, but if you're going to go full external audio recorder, you're probably better off hiring a Sound Recordist with her/his own kit who can use it to its full potential, otherwise it's probably overkill.

 

[Matt Gerard]

We mount a Sound Devices Mix Pre to our epic rig for most shoots, and pipe that into the epic. Doing that allows me to crank the epic pre's way downed keep the noise floor from the epic pre's lower. I did a side by side compare, and while noticeable, its not a huge change. but it helped, and having real knobs helps during the shoot as well. Plus the limiter on the MixPre is very very good. can hardly hear it unless something is pounding the hell out of it. We rarely use an external recorder, the internal audio can work fine as long as your gain structure is balanced and set up right and not introducing more noise.

we did have a shoot where we were using a sound guy with a full 744 setup. we recorded sound in 3 places, inside the AF100 we were using, into a PIX240 (sound devices) and inside his 744T. All audio was being fed from the 744T to the camera and PIX240. I then compared it in adobe audition, and the AF100 was noisy as hell, almost unusable when compared to the other 2. the PIX240 and the 744 were nearly identical, the PIX being slightly more noisy, but only if you cranked it wayyyyy up. The 744T didn't have a noise floor. There just wasn't any noise there at all.

I'm going to try to do the same test with the EPIC as soon as we get a shoot that requires it.