Bass distortion

Can anyone help. I recently recorded a friends party. There was a DJ playing the usual party tunes and the sound from his set up was really good. I recorded some of the party with my Canon XH-A1 with the audio record level set to auto. When I play the footage back the bass from the footage sounds distorted. The rest of the sound and picture quality is fine. The same thing happend when I recorded my friends band but I thought it was down to the speakers or something. I recorded both times from the centre of the room, a distance away from the speakers Any idea's how this has happened and how I can prevent it from happening again.

:confused:

When you use AGC to set your sound level it sometimes isn't quick enough to react between the loud sounds of a thumping bass and the not so loud sounds between the bass notes. So you have the bass being recorded too loud which leads to distortion. The way to fix that problem is to use manual control if you have it available and set the level where the bass won't distort.

The other possiblity is that your camera mic just can't handle the sound level coming from a really loud source. That's pretty common for condenser microphones like the one in your camera. The soloution for that is to either use an external mic that will record a louder signal. It's possible you would still need to use manual level adjustment and also possible that you would need to attenuate the signal from the mic before it reaches the camera. You can use attenuation cables for this. They come in various strengths from -10db to -30db or more but likely your need would fall into this range. You could also use an inline volume control to turn the signal down (attenuate it). They are cheaper than attenuator cables and they give you more control but they eventually wear out because dirt will get in the pot for the control knob. But they only cost less than $10 so you can replace them when this happens. These are actually designed to control the volume of headphones but they work great to control the signal from a microphone also.

Here are some links that might help you.

Core Sound attenuator cables (http://www.core-sound.com/attenuator-cables.html)

Radio Shack Volume Control Cable (http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2102975&cp=&kw=gold+plated+volume+control&parentPage=search)

These are just examples of course. I realize there probably are no Radio Shack's in Scotland but there are other inline volume controls available.