[Tutorial] Installing, and using an external microphone.

[Bob]

Installing and using an external microphone

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In this tutorial, i'll be going over the most common steps on setting up an external microphone on an Hikvision camera with an audio terminal block. You will know if a hikvision camera has an audio terminal block if the product name has an 'S' suffix near the end (Excluding the 2432, and 2532 cameras, as these have built in microphones.) An example of applicable camera models; DS-2132F-IS DS-2732-IWS.

If you're not sure which camera you should be picking, you can contact us via phone or the web chat.

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Index
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• Preparing the microphone
• Configuring the microphone with Synology
• Configuring the microphone with a Hikvision NVR

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Preparing the microphone
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Now, the first thing you'll need to do is make sure that you've got the right type of microphone, and prepare it for the camera. The microphone I will be using may be listed on our website shortly, in which case, I will update this post with the relevant links. The microphone will need an external power supply, in my case, a simple 12V power supply.

Once you've got the mic, you're going to need to make some adjustments to the cable in order to get it to work with your camera. By default the microphone will come to a plated Phono RCA connector (shown in the picture below) You will want to remove this by cutting the cable here. Be careful, DONT cut the end with the microphone on, or the wire that ends in the power supply, this will break the microphone.

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Once you have cut the end off the Phono wire, strip about an inch of the wire to reveal the copper, and center white wire. Separate the copper from the center. The copper wire will be the basis of the ground wire, and the white wire will be the 'Audio line in' wire.

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Strip the white wire; it's very thin so it shouldn't take much effort at all (make sure to be careful not to cut the copper inside the wire) Once you've done this, you want to twist the strands of copper together, for both the ground wire and the white center wire.

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Once this is done, the wire is prepped correctly, and you can begin to screw it into the terminal block of your camera. As stated previously, the white center wire goes into the 'audio in' section on the terminal block, and the outer copper wire goes into the audio in 'G' (ground) section of the terminal block. Once this is done you're ready to get the microphone working on your system.

Configuring the microphone with Synology
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Synology makes it pretty easy to get a microphone working on a camera that you intend to use in conjunction with surveillance station. Once you have the microphone attached to the camera, add the camera to surveillance and make sure that the audio codec G.711 is selected, and enable audio recording in the recording settings.

Configuring the microphone on a Hikvision NVR
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It gets a little trickier with a Hikvision NVR (unfortunately) as the cameras do not default to the correct settings for audio upon connecting the two. Now, you want to be doing this with a monitor and mouse directly connected to the NVR, as I've not found a way to set up the camera any other way. Open up the menu and navigate to the 'Record' submenu. From here, on the left hand side click on the Parameters option. Now, select the camera with an attached microphone, and look at the stream type; this should be set to video & audio. Once this is set, and you've made all the other settings are as you expect them to be hit apply.

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Finally, click the more settings button and check the 'record audio' button. Now your camera should be capturing and recording audio through the microphone.

Final notes
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That's all for now, I should be testing further options in the future, so we'll see how that goes. If you need any help setting up a microphone, feel free to leave comments below. As always, if you purchased from us, we can offer free technical support over the phone, or via our web chat.

 

[bien gomez]

Hi.

Does this model comes with a built-in microphone?

Thanks

 

[Kieran]

Hi bien,

The Hikvision cameras with an -S suffix (DS-2CD2132F-IS) have an audio I/O terminal block in to which you'd wire an external microphone. They don't have internal microphones.

The 2532F and 2432F models however do have an inbuilt microphone.

 

[bien gomez]

Hi Kieran.

Thanks. No wonder there is no sound during live view. Btw, if there is no built-in mic, the GUI settings has 2 options for audio. These are "MicIn" and "LineIn". I got confused because all along I though there is a built-in
microphone.

Also, we tried connecting a speaker to the i/o block (audio out) but I can't hear any sound on the external speaker. The sound however was heard on the PC speaker. I was accessing the IPCam via a browser. I saw a post on this link how to connect a mic to the audio terminal block. =)

Thanks so much. =)