Hello i'm Graham Houghton and welcome to today's video. Now in this video i'm hopefully
going to answer the question is it worth buying expensive low earlier microphones for your youtube
productions or audio recording now currently i'm using this Sennheisser system it's the old
Sennheisser ew100 it's a vhf system fully compliant with the uk regulations at the moment
so no concerns about using it and it's a very good grade of transmitting receiver pack for your
camera so it is a sort of consumer level device but gives very good results so the question is do
you need broadcast quality lavalier microphones to go with these devices to give you good audio
you can buy these lavalier microphones for as little as eight pounds on amazon or you can spend
over 200 pounds if you're buying the professional grade ones now i've got the ew2 mic that's
currently plugged into the Sennheisser which is the one that's supplied with the sennheisser kit
and if you were to buy a replacement microphone that would cost you about 107 pounds in the uk
at the moment so i'm going to test this uh ew2 that you're hearing now against a range
of lovely microphones ranging from the a pound to 20 pound and then one that i've been sent by joby
you know you remember joby are manufacturers of peripherals for your camera such as a gorillapod
but they also do a range of microphones and the wavelove pro is one of their latest additions and
this sentence kindly for me to test for you so uh full disclaimer it was provided free of charge for
this review but again it's an independent review and you will get to hear all about this microphone
without any bias at all so we're going to look at the audio quality between these devices and i'm
going to use the same settings on the mic mixer to make sure that we've got the same level so you
can see the sensitivities of the microphone and the frequency responses so the moment this is the
ew2 what i'm going to do first is to change over to the microphone that i built into these glasses
just a standard electric condenser microphone similar that you would find in a mobile phone
and i've just wired it into the side leg of this glasses so i'll pause the video and switch over
to that so you know hearing the sound from the microphone that's now bonded to the side leg
of these glasses it's just a standard electric condenser microphone again the output is plugged
into the pw100 transmitter so what i want to do with the test is to look at the noise floor how
much background noise there is are there any hiss crackles and pops and again the frequency response
how they respond to human voice no equalization in post-production so you're hearing the raw
sound from each of these microphones so this is the little glasses modification i made what i'm
going to do now is switch over to a microphone which was on ebay and i think it cost me eight
pounds again an electric condenser microphone does have the captive uh plug on here so it is
designed for rigs which you need a locking screw such as this body pack or indeed if you're using
an audio recorder such as this Tascam dr-10 which is a nice little neat pass-through recorder so
you can actually use this as redundancy recording for your production uh quite expensive but i think
they're worth buying if you're into serious audio recording you can actually use it as a standalone
audio recorder as well because of its small compactness if you're a wedding photographer
or something like that you can actually place this on your talent and have a good audio pick up
so let me switch over to this tempo mike and we'll again look at the audio from that
so you're now hearing the audio from this 10-pound microphone that i purchased on amazon the first
thing to note is when i tried to clip this on the plastic clip broke so again after a period of time
the plastic has degraded and the clip has broken so just out of it a new clip to that microphone
but this is the sound quality if i just be quiet for a moment we can look at the noise floor
on my view meters it's showing very very low but the hiss might be
apparent in the video i'll now switch over to another mid-range microphone again i purchase
this on amazon and i'll switch over to that and we'll listen to the audio quality from that
so we'll just test this microphone and then finally we'll look at the huevo pro
in the uk it's 69 pounds so we expect a better quality from it and i'll show you that in just
a moment so you know hearing the audio from that mid-range priced microphone um it's available on
amazon i'll put a link to it in the video description below i think it's called the
sps so let's have a look at the audio quality and i'll stop talking we can look at the noise floor
again down to the minus 70 db mark so not very much background noise so we've looked at some
other microphones i want now to concentrate on the
wild love pro which is supplied by joby for this review so let's have a look at what you get when
you unbox the product i'm going to switch back to the audio from the sennheiser microphone
okay so i switched back over to the sennheiser microphone
let's just listen to the noise floor in that microphone for a moment
again showing about minus 70 db on the meter so again quite a quiet microphone so this
is the huevo laugh pro microphone um it is a small condenser microphone look at the specifications
it's omnidirectional which most of these microphones are has a frequency response 20 hertz
to 20 kilohertz sensitivity is minus 45 db plus or minus 3 db the maximum input sound pressure level
is 120 db where the me2 mic from sennheiser can tolerate a higher sound pressure of 130 decibels
the bias for this is between one and a half and ten volts so that would be provided by most
cameras or input audio recorders the microphone diameter is five millimeters so it's slightly
smaller than the standard six millimeter capsule now the microphone cable on this particular device
is about two and a half meters long so technically i could plug that microphone directly into the
camera and be free of any preamps etc danger is that you walk away forgetting that you tethered
to the camera and pulled the camera over so i do tend to use lavalier microphones with wireless
transmitters so i don't run into that issue i haven't had that in the past and pulled a camera
over so let's have a look now at this device itself so they do provide you with a little full
leather pouch to protect the device and inside we can see we have the device itself now note
this doesn't have a lock shield plug on here so ideally this will go into a camera or into your
adapter for your phone if you're using it with a phone or indeed again it would just plug into
a standard three and a half millimeter socket like this without the need of the locking ring but in
a professional environment it's nice to have a locking ring to make sure that there's no noise
as these plugs move around or they don't get pulled out but for general amateur use
i guess this is sufficient if you're going to plug this into your side of the camera
no issue at all got a nice clip for your connection to your material of your shirt or
blouse or whatever it does rotate so you can actually move the microphone around if you want
it to orange out the other way around to get away from sibilance issues it does have a little foam
windshield let's just take that off and you can see the size of this capsule is very very small
five millimeters the standard capsule tends to be bigger than that which is like this
six millimeters and again much longer but you're getting a bunch better quality from this device
i'll leave the foam windshield off for this test so it's uh comparable with the others now again
you can see this is the length of cable you'll get with this device and it is one of those
cables which is it feels as though it's got a sort of a steel core to it it's like a springy lead
just tend to tangle a little bit i found in practice but nothing you can't sort out so
what i'm going to do now is plug this into the sennheiser ew 100 and we'll listen to the audio
quality from this device as i said before this microphone will cost you 69 pounds in the uk
are we going to get any different audio quality from this device compared to the cheaper models
let me plug it into the ew 100 and we'll find out so you know hearing the audio from this love pro
mic captured at the same distance as a sennheiser to keep a level playing field the levels are the
same it looks a little a little bit hot so i'm going to drop the volume of this so it doesn't
peak so i've reset the levels of the device and it's about minus 13 db the same as the sennheiser
so it should have the same sound pressure now this mic i guess was developed for the wife pro
range of microphones these are blimp microphones which fit on top of your heart shoe of your camera
doing have a minus 10 db safety track as well so one track is recorded at normal volume the
other is recorded at minus 10 so if you do get a peak up which gives you clipping
you can then just use that part of the track from the safety track
to overcome that peak so that's a useful feature you can check those out on their website
so this is the audio quality let me just be quiet for a moment and look at the noise floor
again round about the minus 70 db on the scale so very quiet might be able
to hear some hiss so as i said before there's going to be no post production
of the audio i'm not going to apply any compressors or expanders
any noise reduction or anything it's just raw audio you're hearing from these microphones
well i hope you found that comparison useful and gives you an idea of what you can get with the
higher grade microphones compared to the lower price models so until my next video thanks very
much for watching please do take care and i hope to see you all very very soon goodbye for now