The article "Nikon D850 audio measurements" is by Otto Peter ( check also Otto's previous guest post): I recently upgraded from the D800 to the D850. Nikon has made so many lovely improvements, that I had high hopes for audio. Alas… First problem: bad frequency response. As the D800 and the D4s, which I had measured before, the D850 mercilessly cuts off everything below 120Hz (-3dB cutoff frequency of a 2nd order highpass). To be totally clear, this is the "wide" setting. The only chance for a proper frequency response is to compensate in post, which is not straightforward with most audio editors. You cannot boost low frequencies before feeding the signal into the camera, as this would seriously over-drive the analog electronics. 19dB attenuation at 30Hz means that 9 times the voltage of a 1kHz signal is needed to get the same digital amplitude. Here are the frequency responses of "wide" and "vocal" between 20Hz and 16kHz. They have been measured using a multi-tone signal (29 frequencies in the range of the graph) at the external microphone input, and have been normalized to 1kHz of the "wide" setting. The second problem: clipping in the analog domain, before the signal is digitized, and well below digital full scale. The full digital range is never used, except in sensitivity settings 19 and 20, attenuator on. For a 1kHz sine signal, the maximum amplitude is about 3dB down from, or 71% of digital full scale in most settings, which corresponds to the top...
Published By: Nikonrumors - Sunday, 16 September, 2018