Will sound trigger camera to record? Is quality of recorded sound good? Distance of audio record?

[booxman]

I'm considering buying an Ultra 2 system.  The ability of the camera to record excellent sound is important to me.  Will sound trigger the camera to record without any movement?  Is the quality of the recorded sound very good?  At what distance will the camera record sound?

[StephenB]

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@booxman wrote:

 Will sound trigger the camera to record without any movement? 

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You can set it up to do that.  There is a sensitivity control that determines the sound level needed.

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@booxman wrote:

  At what distance will the camera record sound?

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That of course depends on how loud the sound happens to be, so there is no good answer.

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@booxman wrote:

 Is the quality of the recorded sound very good?  

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The recording is monophonic with a 16 kbps sample rate.  It is compressed using AAC LC - average bitrate is 56 kb/s, and the max is 128 kb/s.  That is very reasonable compression for this sample rate.

Although the Ultra does supress wind noise, you will still hear some in the recordings.  I find the quality overall in the recordings to be quite good. 

[LandJS]

Sound quality has a number of things to consider based on expectations.  Though voices are easily picked up by Arlo understanding them is another thing.  For one casual conversation is not usually very loud so even though you hear it understanding what is said could even be dependent on how well you yourself understand speech.  You can hear people talking in your driveway for instance and even as someone who needs hearing aids I can understand some of the conversation.  Yet when a camera is triggered I can hear and understand Karaoke when a neighbor 400 feet away is having a party and it's coming from a amp and my neighbors chickens 200 feet away at feeding time and clearly enough to tell which one of their 4 dogs is barking.  As for conversation with this system, I find pointless because of lag time (opinion only) so looking at the new nest that has smart capabilities for my front door.

[StephenB]

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@LandJS wrote:

As for conversation with this system, I find pointless because of lag time (opinion only) 

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Totally agree.  Plus some folks have experienced low volume in the real-time mode (which doesn't seem to be a problem with the recordings).

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@LandJS wrote:

Sound quality has a number of things to consider based on expectations.  Though voices are easily picked up by Arlo understanding them is another thing.  For one casual conversation is not usually very loud so even though you hear it understanding what is said could even be dependent on how well you yourself understand speech.  

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Yeah, it can't be easily characterized in a post.

I listened to a few recordings from my Ultra (not an Ultra 2), just to get a fresh sense of the quality before I replied.  I agree that conversation might sometimes be too quiet to hear at a distance, especially if the speaker is facing away from the camera.  And of course background noise and reverberance can also interfere with intelligibility.

But I could hear and understand the speech in the recordings I sampled, and I easily heard other sounds (traffic, basketball being dribbled and shot, the door and mailbox being opened and closed).  

@booxman, it might be helpful if you gave some use cases, so we'd have some idea of what stuff you want to hear.