Issues with very bad and pervasive noise and interference on Zoom F3 and RODE NTG3 (1 Viewer)

[jbtuttle]

Hey folks, I am pretty desperate for some help regarding some noise/interference issues I'm having with my recording setup. I am having this very frustrating issue where on some recordings-not all- there is this very loud hiss/noise that overtakes any sort of target sound I am trying to record, as well as a band of interference that is also horrible to have on my recordings. This deletes the value of the recordings where I have this issue.

I really need help- The first thing I tried was keeping my phone on airplane mode, with bluetooth turned off, and that did not help. My phone sits in my pocket rather near where my recorder sits on my hip. Next I figured it may be my cables, as the cables I got were kind of cheap and probably not the best quality, so I upgraded my XLR cables to some Gotham cables. This also did not help as I learned this morning.

I am not sure where to go from here- the way my setup is right now I set my mic and pistol grip shock mount on my hip sort of resting on the cable's connection to the recorder when I am not actively recording so I can use binoculars and what not, and I am wondering if doing that has caused some damage to the input slot I have been using. That is all I really have to go on. Has anyone experienced this or has any advice? I would be so grateful. Thanks all.

Here is a link to one of the bad recordings and I have attached images of the spectrograms to demonstrate the difference between noisy and non-noisy recordings, recorded in the same recording session, and with no notable difference in conditions.

ML626185385 - finch sp. - Macaulay Library

Macaulay Library ML626185385; © Joe Tuttle; Park, Colorado, United States

macaulaylibrary.org

I am relatively new to sound recording, so please let me know if there's more information I can provide.

 

[Lerxst]

I cannot recall hearing about trouble with that Rode mic before, but be aware that the NTG5 has caused headaches for some of us trying to use it with the Zoom F3. The following are excerpts from what I shared on the xeno-canto forums, at:

RODE NTG5 vs Sennheiser MKE 600 :: topic 43220 :: xeno-canto

xeno-canto.org

I just bought an NTG5 to go along with a Zoom F3 32-bit recorder, and I had noise/RFI issue show up immediately. It can be "solved" by reducing the phantom power voltage to 24V, but this will likely sacrifice performance. Contacted both Zoom and Rode immediately -- the former has been responsive, the latter has not.

As soon as I plugged the NTG5 into the Zoom F3 there was absolutely horrible noise/RFI. It was not subtle. Besides troubleshooting it as far as I could, I scoured the web and found this thread, plus others (non-birding related) that documented similar problems. My experience was not unique.

I reported the issue to Rode immediately, on Feb 8. I heard back from them via email on Feb 10, and they asked for full details on my setup and settings, as well as some sample audio files. I already had these ready (I had sent them to Zoom because they responded within hours to my email days earlier).

Then I heard nothing from Rode for almost two weeks. I was expecting that after reviewing the ghastly WAV files I sent them, that they would provide me with a shipping label so I could send the mic to them. Nope. I lost my patience with them and sent the mic back to Amazon for a full refund.

On Feb 23, I got an email from them saying that they were unable to replicate the problem. My immediate reaction was, "well, I didn't expect you to, not without using the same mic." Having worked as an FA engineer in the electronics industry, I was taken aback that their immediate reaction to my first email wasn't "send us that mic, we want to look at it!" When you are trying to root out failure modes that are latent or low PPM, it is crucial to actually have a failing device. Not one off your shelf, otherwise known as a control.

In the meantime, ordered a Sennheiser MKH-416. Using it with the Zoom F3 has been a joy. Absolutely no RF issues. Yes, it is considerably more expensive, and from a spec POV, maybe a bit worse. But that is all secondary to the fact that it behaves as it should, and I'm simply not going to buy any products from Rode if they are going to be so mediocre in their FA/QA. And I told them exactly that. They do not seem very interested in having me as a customer.

It gives me no joy to report any of this, because based on the specs and for the price, I really, really wanted the NTG5.

 

[Lerxst]

You might want to post about this at the xeno-canto forum as well. The person that started the thread I linked to mentions that he went with the NTG3. Now that I re-read it, it looks like he had the same problem with the NTG3.

Have you tried contacting Rode?

 

[jbtuttle]

You might want to post about this at the xeno-canto forum as well. The person that started the thread I linked to mentions that he went with the NTG3. Now that I re-read it, it looks like he had the same problem with the NTG3.

Have you tried contacting Rode?

Thanks for your replies. I have not tried contacting Rode yet, I have a Zoom H5 and may try to recreate the issue there and see what happens. The frustrating and strange part is how intermittent it is for me- of the ~8 recordings I took this morning, it was about half perfect and half unusable. If I can recreate the issue on my H5 I will take it to Rode then. Seems like if they don't have a good answer for me I may end up using Sennheiser as well. It is validating, if depressing, reading that thread on xenocanto.

 

[Jon.Bryant]

Have you tried contacting Rode?

Hi Lerxst,

I don't have a solution to jbtuttle's problem, but was a bit surprised when I listen to his recording. Have you tried listening to the recording and does this sound similar to the RF interference that you suffered? As shown in the 'explosion' sonogram above, the sound starts off high pitch, then slowly descends in pitch, becomes general 'white noise' in the middle, then climbs in pitch again. I have not heard RF interference with this type of pattern, but there again all my equipment has worked well together. You can imagine (as a layman) that it sounds almost like something decaying, then charging again, so I wonder if it is a faulty component, rather than interference.

Thanks for your replies. I have not tried contacting Rode yet

As I say, I don't have an answer, but can you describe what happens either side of the sonogram you have provided. i.e. does the descended and rising interference start again, so it a continuous up and down pattern in the sonogram, or does the noise happen intermittently during a long recording, with periods of normal operation in between the weird noise?

I note that you have put your phone in to airplane mode, and phone interference is normally a rather short and grating series of pips - not a weird slowly descending and rising noise. However, one forum member found that his iPhone and iWatch were causing intermittent problems with his setup, so left them at home and immediately solved his problem. It may be worth doing the same with all your other devices just to completely eliminate another source as the issue.

 

[jbtuttle]

As I say, I don't have an answer, but can you describe what happens either side of the sonogram you have provided. i.e. does the descended and rising interference start again, so it a continuous up and down pattern in the sonogram, or does the noise happen intermittently during a long recording, with periods of normal operation in between the weird noise?

I note that you have put your phone in to airplane mode, and phone interference is normally a rather short and grating series of pips - not a weird slowly descending and rising noise. However, one forum member found that his iPhone and iWatch were causing intermittent problems with his setup, so left them at home and immediately solved his problem. It may be worth doing the same with all your other devices just to completely eliminate another source as the issue.

Thanks for the reply. I spent a while this morning trying to recreate the issue on my H5 and all the recordings were good. However, I also tried to recreate the issue using the same conditions on my F3, and all the recordings were good there too, so I learned nothing as the issue is so unpredictable. I am scratching my head as to what could be causing it.

Sad thing about not using my phone, is I'm a big eBird mobile guy, so I'd have to figure some other way to take the data I reckon. Worth a shot though at some point. I hope that's not what it is.

I'm going to attach an image showing some other examples of sonograms with the issue on them. As you can see the one I already posted is there that looks like an explosion, but there are others where you can see that that band of interference just sort of wanders around or isn't easily visible at all.



Also worth noting just for clarity that the bigger issue is actually the huge amount of white noise that this issue adds- the little band of interference that moves around is terrible, but the huge amount of white noise is what totally drowns out any target sounds. The pictures I shared initially demonstrate this well- these were recorded at the same "volume" level that the F3 lets you adjust. As you can see, the difference is huge and it is very difficult to pick out the remnants of the bird sounds in that spectrogram vs the clean, dark spectrogram below, which was recorded within minutes of the first one, with the exact same settings. So frustrating.

Edit: one thing I want to add to answer your question is that I have never seen the issue start or end in the middle of a recording. It is always all or nothing, all bad, or all good. Maybe this is from a small sample size but felt it was worth noting.

 

[Lerxst]

Hi Lerxst,

I don't have a solution to jbtuttle's problem, but was a bit surprised when I listen to his recording. Have you tried listening to the recording and does this sound similar to the RF interference that you suffered? As shown in the 'explosion' sonogram above, the sound starts off high pitch, then slowly descends in pitch, becomes general 'white noise' in the middle, then climbs in pitch again. I have not heard RF interference with this type of pattern, but there again all my equipment has worked well together. You can imagine (as a layman) that it sounds almost like something decaying, then charging again, so I wonder if it is a faulty component, rather than interference.

Jon:

I had not listened to the audio until now; I was going more from his verbal description. But you are right, it is surprising, and it is qualitatively much different from what the NTG5 was usually doing, and so perhaps caused by a very different problem. I agree that it might suggest something capacitive.

Experimenting with the removal of any and all nearby electronics should be telling, as well as trying another recorder. As mentioned in my post excerpt, changing the phantom power voltage had a dramatic effect in my case, and would be curious what it does here.

 

[Lerxst]

Thanks for the reply. I spent a while this morning trying to recreate the issue on my H5 and all the recordings were good. However, I also tried to recreate the issue using the same conditions on my F3, and all the recordings were good there too, so I learned nothing as the issue is so unpredictable. I am scratching my head as to what could be causing it.

I went back to my notes and saw that I also ran my Rode with a Zoom H5 to troubleshoot, and it worked fine. The F3 was not at fault though; it has never had a problem with any other mic I plugged into it. If you can continue to produce the noise with no nearby sources of potential noise/interference, I'd get some examples captured and sent to Rode and hopefully they will be more responsive for you than they were for me.

 

[iveljay]

Over the years i have had problems related to cablng and connectors, even connectors being slightly the wrong shape or size, picking up or generating extraneous noise, but usually some form of shielding failure in one case the cable being the right length to act as a tuned ariel it appeared as the combination of it + what it was connected to seemed to be picking up noise from a nearby electronic source.
I have never had a faulty Rode mic, but its not impossible. I do have the luxury of a variety of cables and different devices so I can pin point the origin of the fault even if the actual root cause illudes me. Certainly my biggest problem has been cabling whether its some kind of incompatability or fault, The only time I have heard similar noises to yours was working with radio reception equipment or set ups that were acting like one.
With one noise I was assured that they (not Rode) had only experienced it from folks in urban environments picking it up from nearby factories, neighbours faulty electronics etc. However I live in the country and even the nearest cow is some distance away!
Certainly testing in a field away from power lines or anything else electronic, then swapping cables for one of a different make, tended to be my first steps. However at the end of the day I have had faulty mics, but normally it has been something else and the list is quite long.