Re: Audio Hiss

[Phil Beastall] "Well the mic doesn't have anything to do with it because even with it unplugged you could hear a hiss when I turned the levels up."

A condenser mic will usually have a much higher output (great "sensitivity" figures) and the signal will be high enough that the gain does not need to be increased so much, reducing the background hiss.


[Phil Beastall] "surely there should be no hiss when nothing is plugged in?"

No input can exhibit noise that can drop significantly when there is a proper amount of input "impedance" added, as when an input device (in this case, a mic) is connected.
This is especially true of high-gain mic inputs.
Most line-level inputs won't exhibit much noise with no connection.

All this is moot if your camcorder currently has some audio technical problems.
I can't tell that from this end.