The fact that I have been using various Nokia phones and attending multiple Iron Maiden concerts (5 at last count) over the years led me to this amazing demonstration of the improving audio quality of Nokia cameraphones. While I have been a big fan of the N95 camera but I always complained about the audio quality when recording video in loud environments. This video that I recorded at the Iron Maiden show in Concord in 2008 shows how the N95 struggled with clipping and noise issues when the environment was too loud.
Now fast forward 2 years and I went to another Iron Maiden show in Concord a few weeks ago with an N900 and recorded the following video clip. In this video I am once again in the front row of the pit but am offset to the right and am in fact standing right in front of a 6 foot high speaker stack. Both video were copied off the phone and directly uploaded to Youtube with no editing of any sort.
As you can see the N900 video has much better audio quality and is actually good enough to understand the song lyrics despite the fact that I am actually standing in a noisier location. Additionally the video is in true 16:9 widescreen with fewer compression artifacts than the N95 video. It is also better at dealing with the low light levels and the background lights pointed at the screen.
I have to give kudos to Nokia for continuously improving the performance of their devices and cant wait to play with the N8 when it comes out in October.
P.S.: All the photos below were taken with my N900 at the same concert. You can also see two other videos I shot below
One reply on “Amazing audio quality of the Nokia N900”
Thank you for this report! I will go to a show of band Pain of Salvation with my n900 and I just wondered if I could record the sound (I don’t care about the video).