@MarcinC520WS 

hi, can you please upload a sample video of a few seconds after the firmware update?  thank you.

  @bob-one 

I can vouch for this poor sound quality.

I pushed the mic value to the max, you just get more constant distorted sound, whereas at the lower 'recommended' setting it's intermittent.  This suggests, it is not in fact the anti-noise suppression aspect kicking in.  By pushing the mic sensitivity right up, the fact it becomes constant the sound incoming, yet is still distorted, says this, to me at least, but what do I know.

I have literally recorded sound using a HD 'action camera' WITH THE LID SHUT FOR WATERPROOFING, and when you amplify the sound by like, 30x, you can hear and make out the speech at several metres, well.  This, is way, way worse.  It's almost like it's designed to garble.

Unintelligible is the word.

This, as it stands, is a fault.  I don;t know if it is the mic itself, or 'firmware' or software, or bitrate, but I can say this:  our connection to the camera the 520WS, is top-notch.  I was therefore surprised to see, as we have NOT used the Tapo cloud etc, but just local storage, that the bitrate reported somewhere in the app, was abysmally low.

As a former IT man, I would make my guess as this...the system seems designed to treat as a priority, ultra-low bitrate, varying it, but it's always low/poor.  It's like it's designed to only work for cloud use, which of course as it's got unintelligible sound, it can;t even manage.

We have a really great internal network, top-notch switches, and I used Cat 7 super-shielded cable for this camera throughout.  To find that not only is it deficient in terms of sound, but actually the visible image quality is VERY poor for HD, let alone the purported QHD, is a surprise and disappointment.

A lousy and variable, badly-managed bitrate, would probably explain ALL these malign deficiencies.  It's a great camera, on paper, but the actual performance is neutered by this odd bitrate or whatever issue.

I'd challenge in fact, that this image quality is better than 720p even in briad daylight. It's really not HD and this makes me think, the idea of 'QHD' is somehow implemented with upscaling of some sort, there is ni way the camera is QHD/2k quality, or if it is, then the bitrate or some other issue has crippled it.  It's odd, because when I first switched it on, it seemed really good.  

So, in my installation, we have top quality shielded cable all the way, I have set the mic sensitivity to max, in the red zone, and the switch it goes into is Gigabit TP-link.  I would have thought, you could just let the bitrate be full-speed, when like us, we don't have any tapo cloud access?  

So, this is either a dud batch, or an inherent fault.  I am on the latest firmware 1.2.6 I think it's called, it was set to auto-update.  Amazon sold these at a discount, this may be why.  It's annoying for me, being out in the rain and wind, using proper junction boxes and cables, then to find the camera itself is borderline.  It's not life or death, and I got £65 worth of placeholder, and it's hugely better than nothing, but still.

Still a fan of Tapo, this is a bit of an aberration I suspect.  Definitely will look for either a different Tapo for camera number 2, or a totally different make.  Won't be returning it, because actually vision matters the most.

Conclusion: as it stands, this camera is a placeholder, until I get a decent one that has genuinely 2k/QHD quality and 

  @bob-one 

FYI

Seeing someone here posted bitrate info etc, i hunted out what might be recommended.

The audio is taken at 8,000Hz it seems, which is kind-of down at old telephone level.

The bitrate is in the low hundreds it seems...so I would make a guess, if recommended bitrate for merely HD is above 4,000kbps,

and we're stuck at 300 or less kbps for audio and video together, we've got the culprit.

Totally forgiveable, if it's cloud storage, that's got to be expensive to truly cover true HD audio and video storage costs, so at the price

Tapo is charging, there has to be a limit.  BUT if as we are in our home, we use top-notch local SD storage and cat 7 cables and gigabit switch connection

 to our home hub (sky 'Q' box), we should be free and clear of all that.

Which makes it seem to me, Tapo actually built this to be specified for their modest cloud storage system, and did not want to exploit

 the advantage of avoiding all the bitrate issues for people like us.  Dunno why, but that's the end result.

Again, not life or death!  But, it seems clear we are short of about 36kHz in the audio recording department, and about 4,000kbps in the video transmission department?

Appreciate the help Tapo people are giving, however, please let that be said.

IBM's recommendations for full HD ie 1920p video and audio:

Can someone confirm if audio issue also exists on v1.6 hardware revision.

  @harmandeep 

what is the difference between HW versions 1.0 and 1.6?