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Hi there, I'm sort of new here (have been reading, no posting), so maybe a little introduction seems appropriate! I've been doing commercial and free video / motion design work for a while now, mainly shooting on a DSLR. I do this with a friend and we're based in The Netherlands. Sound hasn't exactly been stellar in our productions (filmmakers ahoy), so after loads of reading up, we decided to upgrade to the following setup: Main microphone (besides lavs): Sanken CS-3e Mixer: SD Mixpre-D Recording device: Either the Zoom H4n or directly into the Canon 7D or iPad We're planning on two setups, recording straight into the Canon 7D (no syncing in post, seems a bit easier to setup) and the option of recording using the Zoom H4n (more mobile). Below is a description of our setup so far. Please forgive me if I don't make sense or ask for the obvious, I'm trying to learn about audio, but I'm not exactly an expert. Setup 1. SD Mixpre-D to Canon 7D We have been doing some tests with the Mixpre running a cable from the unbalanced mic out straight into the Canon 7D (with the new manual audio firmware update). In the first test we put on the tone oscillator and on the 7D we matched the dB output to the display of the LED's on the Mixpre. We got a lot of noise in this setup. Is this coming from the 7D? In the next test, we put the audio levels in the 7D almost all the way down and we got little, to no noise. However, we're not sure how to monitor audio on the Mixpre with the recording levels being much lower. Do we just figure out the difference between the recording and monitoring or is there another solution? A different question: on the Mixpre, I can set the recording to L C R, since we're using a mono mic, is it wise to keep it on L? Setup 2. SD Mixpre-D to Zoom H4n I found this article by filmmaker Dan McComb explaining how he hooked up his Mixpre to a Zoom H4n, however, he seems to change his mind about the setup quite regularly. So I'm not sure if this is the way to go or not. Do any of you guys have experience with setting this up? Would the quality of recording to the Zoom be better than to the Canon 7D? Thanks for taking your time reading!