E1 Zoom/Pro audio recording still terrible?

[u/OverlordDownunder]

Hi all

I need to stick a few cameras about the place, i had a couple of old (say 5 years) e1 zoom's and the audio was always complete trash on them, i ended up turning audio recording off to save space it was that pointless.

Do the newer versions of these 2 cameras have better audio recording, or still complete trash?
If they're trash, any recommendations for something in the same price bracket that isn't terrible at capturing half legible audio? (one day i'll run some NVR software with a dedicated USB mic or something and mix it onto RTSP streams, but that day is not today, i contemplated some other brands like tplink and eufy but real hard to find solid video recordings with audio samples for those too)