Amazing sound quality: OM-D E-5 Mark II

Every online review of this camera mentions poor sound: Loud hiss and noise floor, distortions as soon as you connect an external microphone
Not anymore!
This is a recording of my Steinway Grand Piano with this camera AND external microphones. Those are a pair of dynamic mini capsules available from micbooster.com (No affiliation) and the sound quality is simply amazing, doing justice to Olympus' recording format at 16Bit/48kHz PCM.
How???
There is a Setting that disables the internal microphone preamplifiers and with this you are supposed to use an external recorder as audio interface. However: This setting still provides 3V of phantom power to dynamic microphones and the result is nothing short of spectacular.
In a nutshell:
Go to the 'Movie' sub menu, move down to "PCM Recorder Link" and set "Camera Rec. Volume" to "Inoperative".
Yes, this sounds counterintuitive, but actually it does what it says: You cannot control the microphone's input level from the camera anymore, it's at a fixed setting. Which, however, works perfectly for this kind of microphones. Also tested with binaural OKM microphones.
Basically you can use any mono or stereo external microphone with this setting and the result is really amazing, completely different from what any review tells you.
BTW, the piece is César Franck's 'Prélude', which was composed in 1885. Only one year later, this Steinway B from 1886, S/N 60103 can be heard in this recording from my living and I really love the sound of this piano that came back to life after three years of extensive repairs, regulation voicing and tuning. I hope you enjoy it.

[@MichaelKaykov]

You're in great pianistic shape!

[@OE1FEU]

Thank you! Very inspiring to keep practicing.

[@Bigblackpiano]

This is very
beautiful