Andy sez:the Q3 has it's microphones at 120 degrees. OK MR rabbit ears I'm not hearing what you are hearing;-) I place the Q3 to one side of the monitors, not of equal distance between my monitors, just like they suggest, and the stereo image sounds fine, not imbalanced , no holes or phase cancellation that I can detect. Have you had personal experience with this or are you going on specs alone? Sometimes specs don't tell the whole story. The mic was designed for wide dispersion for a reason, to capture the width of the sound that a live band would put out, with the mic at relatively close range, but far enough away to capture the width of field that the camera is picking up. When i first got it, i took it to NAMM in january and filmed a bit of a singer songwriter and her band play on a big out door stage. Once i realized i needed to use the low mic setting to avoid clipping it sounded great and this was, again, standing in a position where I favored one side of what I assume was a monoral PA rig. I've Placed it a few feet in front of my acoustic guitar and it sounds excellent as well, the mics are pretty amazing for what they are. Sometimes specs don't tell the whole story.
Ok , I'm going to don my turban and look in to my crystal ball and predict they will release an updated version with improvements to the original, with hopefully the following upgrades. A line in to take a direct signal and or a pair of mic pres like the H4 and a line out that does not pass signal from the mics unless you want it to, making it easier to simply plug in to a monitor system and play back without the mics creating screeching feedback if the piece you are monitoring stops and the mics come back on line. I found this out the hard way trying to listen to tracks in my car with the Q3 plugged in to my car sound system. When the tune I was listening to ended, the mics kicked back in EEEEEEEEEEEEOuch!!!! Also an editor librarian that made it easy to extract the audio from the video if you like how something turned out but the video image was boring or embarrassing and you wanted to toss it. lastly it would be cool if there was some zoom capability but now I'm wishing for too much. The Q3 is in no way a perfect product but it is really easy to use and download, and it sounds great. As far as crippling the product, its sold really well for them so some folks are happy. I really dig mine though if I was solely interested in audio quality I would have picked the H4. Bill |