I originally had a couple of v2s and they were workhorses! They worked faithfully for the better part of a decade until they overheated and fried some internals. I figured it was time to upgrade anyway so I got a couple of v4s, put them in the same locations, and thought nothing of it. I soon discovered that one wasn’t catching every audio event (specifically with fainter audio), sometimes it would catch it and it was just static (so the camera is catching the audio, but it is being removed posthumously?). Well after some experimenting, I discovered that it was the fan in the room drowning out other audio. I turned it off and the camera works as expected. This wasn’t an issue for the v2. I caught that there was what sounded to me like audio filtering in some recordings. My assumption is that they added some post audio processing that has neutered the efficacy in certain scenarios. Does anyone know of a way to remove this post processing? Or is the issue something else completely?
To add onto what I mean by the post processing. In a silent room (nothing but ambient noise) streaming the camera will return absolute silence (no background/ambient noise), but when you make a noise, you hear the noise obviously, but under that is a bit of the ambient noise you would normally expect. So my hunch is that the camera “reads” the ambient noise and filters it out? but with a constant white noise from a fan, that would filter out a whole lot.
The threshold can’t be adjusted by the user. They’ve changed it in the firmware a couple of times, once it added too much static so they released a new one that removed it again. With such high compression, they have to do some filtering or there would be constant low garble.
The sensitivity of the mic also seems to adjust dynamically at least from what I’ve observed, so the constant noise of a fan would de-sensitize the mic some. You can increase the sensitivity of event triggers in the settings, but you’ll probably end up with more false positives.
But your title and post imply two different things, are you getting an audio triggered event but then not able to hear the audio? Or just not getting the events at all?
But your title and post imply two different things, are you getting an audio triggered event but then not able to hear the audio? Or just not getting the events at all?
Both. A sound that would trigger an audio recording on my old v2s may or may not trigger on the v4 when there is consistent background noise. And when a sound is picked up but is faint (i.e. low conversation), it is overwhelmed by the background noise, which didn’t happen on the v2. It seems like the sound of the fan is louder on the v4 than it was on the v2, but it’s hard to remember exactly.
For the first scenario, you can turn up the sensitivity to capture more sound events, but you’ll have to toy with the number to find a setting that prevents picking up fan/constant noise and triggering off that.
For the second, honestly it is probably just differences in the microphone used on the two models, they’re many years apart. I’ve found my v4’s mic to be very directional, straight ahead is where it is most focused and I can pick up normal conversation from 20-30 feet away, but off to the side, it has to be much closer. I’d be surprised if your old cam didn’t have some form of filtering on the audio too, the mic may have just been less focused. If you look at the size of the mic hole, it makes sense that it would be very focused. It does seem to have a bit less sensitivity than my Panv3s, but around the same as my OGs. Each has slightly different amounts of “background noise” and compression artifacts in “silence”.
There is audio filtering/processing but I honestly don’t think that’s the issue here, just differences in completely different cameras. Positioning or aiming the camera differently to have the mic facing away (or more away) from the fan may help too.