When I’m filming interviews as a solo videographer, chances are I’ve put lavalier microphones on either a single subject or an interviewer and interviewee, and fed both those channels direct into the camera. Occasionally, as well as being the camera man and sound op, I’ve been the interviewer at the same time. Trouble is, there are only so many jobs you can do at once, and often it’s the audio that suffers the most.

In an ideal world, I’d have a sound operator working alongside me. He or she would feed the mic outputs into a field mixer, and adjust the levels on the fly, feeding me a high quality audio signal. Unfortunately, nine times out of ten, it’s just me on a job.

I’ve never really trusted the auto gain controls and auto level controls on video cameras, and it’s amazing how often you hear the effects of automatic gain control on supposedly high budget TV productions. If the dialogue stops and you suddenly hear an excess of background noise, which then disappears when the dialogue restarts, you’re hearing the irritating effects of automatic gain control. AGC tries to keep volumes nice and level, reducing the gain when the signal gets too loud (so you don’t get distortion when the talent shouts) and boosting the gain when the signal gets too low, perhaps if the talent turns away from the microphone. But one impact of boosting gain is that you also raise the noise floor.

I apologise for the fact that, now I’ve pointed it out to you, you’ll be hearing it all over the place and it will start to annoy you as much as it does me.

I have no complaints about the quality of the preamps on my Panasonic camera, and in the majority of times I’m happy to run my microphones straight into the camera. I switch off the AGC and select a level that gives me enough headroom to cope with the unexpected. But I admit that at times it would be nice to have an extra pair of hands just to ride the levels occasionally. If you haven’t got that, though, what’s the alternative?

I came across this product from Tascam – the DR60D – and I think it’s fantastic. Sitting somewhere between an external recorder and a multi-channel field mixer, it solves several problems at once. First off, it accepts four channels. What I do with those channels is up to me. I could mix them within the DR60D, and feed two channel audio into the camcorder. Or I could record four channels on the DR60D, and free up the camcorder for an extra two channels, enabling me to put microphones on up to six people – perhaps for a panel discussion video. But the one I really like is that you can feed two channels into the Tascam, and it will record those two channels plus a further two with a reduced gain. So if there is ever some loud noise that distorts the first two channels, I’ll still have a non-distorted safety track to save the day.

Overall, this is one of the most versatile and useful products I’ve seen in a while. I probably won’t use it every time, but for an outlay of £199 it’s something I’m more than happy to purchase for occasional use. It’s also the perfect option for when I’m shooting with my DSLR which has much more basic audio facilities.