Wireless audio from P.A. System to DSLR

Question

I do video-taping of my company's events and I have been asked to find a better way of getting audio into the DSLR video. Currently, I am using the transmitter and receiver from a Sennheiser lapel mic in order to get the audio into my videos. We connect the transmitter to the P.A System and the Receiver is hooked up to the DSLR. This works, although audio quality is a bit low.

I was wondering if there is a better way to do this. Priority is on convenience. The reason we are not using an audio recorder is because editing the sound into the video is not worth it for our purposes.

Do give your suggestions on how I can wirlessly get audio into my DSLR video (preferably, without having to edit sound in). Alternatively, if you know of a type of long cable I can use to connect my DSLR directly into the PA system, do let me know

Regards, Aaron

Answer 1

There are a lot of variables in this equation, and any one of them could be the culprit. These include: the quality of the audio picked up by the lapel mic, the quality of the PA preamp, the quality of the PA signal output to the wireless transmitter, the quality of the wireless transmitter, the quality of the wireless receiver, and finally, the quality of the DSLR's audio preamps.

I would start eliminating variables by feeding a known test signal (such as an NPR podcast) into the DSLR audio port, and if that's good, feeding the same signal to the wireless transmitter/receiver pair into the DSLR. If those, too, are good, then your PA system is the problem. If, on the other hand, you cannot get decent audio into your DSLR from a known good source, you are not going to get decent audio into your DSLR from your PA. Which is perhaps why so many DSLR shooters use external audio recording devices--not because they want to go crazy editing audio, but because they don't want to go crazy editing audio.

Regardless, the most reliable way to solve this problem is to introduce and eliminate variables one at a time.