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External microphone with A33 not working

profile.country.fi_FI.title
upponalle
Visitor

External microphone with A33 not working

Hi

Missing sound when using external non-sony-microphone.

I attached an external stereo microphone with a built-in amplifier (ZOOM H1, 1.5 V battery inside, like in the officially compatible ECM-ALST1) to the SLT-A33 camera's Plug in Power MIC jack. When the microphone is connected to the camera, the built-in microphones of the A33 turns off. That way the camera recognizes that it's attached. However when recording videos the sounds are completely missing. When the microphone is plugged off, sounds are recorded and included in the videos normally, using the internal microphones.

I checked that the microphone works and feeds signal to the camera when they are connected. The attaching cable is fine. At the microphone/recorder side, the line-out signal's volume can be adjusted roughly from 1 mV to 1 V. The maximum level I feeded to the camera was roughly 10 mV, and because the videos were absolutely muted, I thought that there is something wrong.

I even built a simple voltage divider circuit in that case that the microphone with built-in amplifier line-out signal level is too high, and to avoidin loading the camera's plug in power circuit i equipped my test circuit with DC-eliminating capacitors but i don't know if that mattered.

I didn't thought that it would be this hard. What am I missing and how can i get this working, and what the camera requires to accept a signal from an external microphone?

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profile.country.fi_FI.title
upponalle
Visitor

Only answer i got when i called sony support was that get a sony microphone. When i asked about required signal levels or other technical details, there was only a deep silence, and then we returned back to "we recommend using sony microphones"...