Testing Nokia's Rich Recording on keyboard and electric guitar

Published by at

Determined to put Nokia's Rich Recording (and HAAC microphones) to the test, Olivier and Jonas here record their own musical efforts at high volume using the Nokia 808 PureView and the Lumia 920 respectively. See the videos below, with comments - Olivier's guitar heroics in covering ten minutes of instrumental 'prog' have to be seen to be believed, and without any microphone distortion on the part of the phone. Impressive.

From Olivier's intro:

A few months ago, I was talking about music and instruments with some of my Twitter friends and we agreed we should record ourselves playing our instrument with our Nokia phones to test the power of the Rich Recording technology.

According to Olivier:

I played on a ESP EC-1000 VB guitar running through a Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier. That amp is a beast and very powerful and it’s almost a miracle that a phone can capture its sound without distortion and noises. The phone passed the test easily !

Here's his video (apparently all filmed on the Nokia 808 too, in several 'takes', and then somehow synced together - impressive editing!):

In addition, as a bonus, one of Olivier's friends chipped in for the test:

Jonas from the Mobile Photography Blog plays keyboard and chose to play “Comptine d’un autre été” on a Roland FP-7. He recorded himself with his Lumia 920 (running Windows Phone):

The video was shot totally on the Lumia 920 in one take:

Both clips, in terms of audio, are impressive, though it's hard to judge absolute audio quality because neither you or I were in the original rooms, to hear the instruments/amps as they were 'live'.

From my own observations capturing video on both the Nokia 808 and Lumia 920, the former produces much crisper audio, though I'm not sure why - perhaps the presence of full stereo capture, perhaps better audio codecs are used, perhaps better sampling rates? I'd welcome your feedback here from your own tests.

Overall though, count this as another data point to certify Nokia's 'Rich Recording'-equipped smartphones for semi-pro audio recording use.

See Olivier's article for more.

Source / Credit: Olivier's PureView