Microphones

I will write down here some notes about my experience with several microphones I have and I want to leave here some considerations about what microphone should be used depending on situation and location.

I end up buying really cheap and affordable microphones, than I checked what it works and what it doesn’t for me and I tried to get the best audio possible from them. It seemed more fun than just buying the most expensive mic available and just make a video about it and tell how good it is.

So I will start listing some of these microphones and for any of them I will explain why I think is a good mic or a bad mic and in what situation is best to use it.

ACTTO Lavalier Mic

The Lavalier mic is useful on many situations, you don’t have to worry about positioning the mic, you just place it on your shirt and that’s it, you will get a good quality sound from it, no matter where you go or where you look at, you can walk and not worry about where is the mic, you know the audio will be pretty much the same at the same level all the time, something to pay attention of course is the background noise (sound that you don’t want in the shot), and wind gusts, you can reduce the annoying sound generated by wind gusts using a wind muff replacing the black windscreen that comes with the mic, and for the background noise, just try to stay away from it!

Just for your information, this is 5 US Dollars omnidirectional microphone, that means, it picks up the same level of sound from all directions and that explain why it might picks up lots of extra noise.

If you are making a video with other persons and you always want to have the best audio when other people are talking you can give the mic to them so you don’t have to do back and forth, with your main mic, between you and the person talking, and you can just pay attention to frame your shots.

ACTTO Studio Mic

The quality is not great, I paid 20 US Dollars for this one, you need to stay really close to have a decent audio quality, is mostly for podcast or education video, since the mic is placed on a table you can’t really move yourself too much, the pop filter is good, I definitely need to do more test but I can’t see lots of situations where I would use it instead of others.

Zoom H1 Mic & Recorder

For 100 US Dollars, it is a good quality microphone and recorder, perfect for ambient sounds, and also perfect to record the audio from an external microphone, not suitable to record vlog style videos, or even educational videos, the microphone itself is unidirectional condenser, it means that the cleanest and louder sound is picked up from the front of the mic but the Zoom H1 has two small condenser mic placed in a way that is going to pick the sound from a wide range of directions, not just from the front. So the mics integrated will pick lots of background sound (unwanted sound).

I personally use it for recording sound effect (ambient sounds), using the integrated mics, and for recording high quality sound from an external microphone (a better mic for recording your voice).

BOYA BY-MM1

It is a tiny nice microphone, 22 US Dollars, it doesn’t weight much, it doesn’t need batteries, and you can use it with smartphone and camera like DSLR or mirrorless. The audio quality is good and most important is a Cardioid microphone, that means, it rejects most of the sound coming from the rear and from the side and pick the loudest and cleanest sound from the front, so it is ideal for vlogging videos, the background noise is lower compared to other mics like the Zoom H1 and Lavalier, if you are recording outside with lots of extra sounds coming from your sorrounding, I highly recommend it.

Comica V30 Pro

This is like the BOYA microphone with steroid, 42 US Dollars, it is self powered, you need extra batteries to power it, it is bigger and it has a higher sensitivity, it will picks up more sound but still retaining a low background noise, the wind muff that comes with the mic is really good at rejecting wind gusts. It is good for vlogging and any kind of situation where you want to record people talking. This mic is a super-cardioid mic, that means, it will picks up the cleanest and louder sound from the front like the BOYA but also will pick up a little bit of sound from the back, so is not recommended to place it close to computer or monitor or any other source that could emit noise.

Built-In Camera Mic

Not good, just buy an external mic, any mic is better than this one. In my case, the built-in mic picks up lots of sound coming from the auto focus of the lens also it adds lots of reverb if you have a poor room acoustics.

That’s the end

That’s it for now, if I get more microphones to talk about I might discuss them in the future here on this blog or maybe not, see you on the next article!

Maybe I should do more Astronomy, I miss astronomy…