Why do waterfalls sound so weird on camera?
In: Technology
Most camera microphones are good in a specific decibel range, around -10 dB I think. Anything below or above will be distorted. That’s why whispers are usually poor quality, and waterfalls or other loud noises are washed out. this can be fixed with a good mic or a great sound engineer.
Because waterfalls are loud enough to exceed the dynamic loudness range of the microphone.
If a microphone has a range of lets say 40 dB, a sound with 40 dB peak will be sampled with the maximum Analogue-digital-converter value e.g. 8 Bit at max = 1111 1111.
Think of sound as a waveform. If a sound is louder than the dynamic range, the part of the waveform above that 40 dB will be sampled as a straight, horizontal line with sharp edges where it goes above the line and where it comes back down. If we transform the waveform from time domain into the frequency domain, we’ll see that there are high frequencies caused by the “edges” which with respect to the sample rate being about 44 KHz can lead to what is called the “alias effect” where frequencies higher than half the sample rate are mathematically folded back into the possible frequency range, disguised as sounds of other frequency. All these mix and if not filtered properly, sound shitty if played on a speaker.
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