The Great Mic Bakeoff: Microphones for Smartphone Video Creators

In today's episode, one of the things that uh I advise people to do, in fact, this was the topic in my most recent email newsletter about testing your gear is to do those tests to figure out what gear works best in any environment. And so today we're gonna do an eight-way bake off with eight different kinds of microphones that plug into the smartphone of your choice. I'm using an iPhone, but these obviously all work with pretty much any uh phone that has uh either a regular audio injact or an adapter or Bluetooth connection. So we're gonna be testing things like the uh Bose QC25s, the whoops, the David Clark HPT30s, the AeroPex, uh the After Aftershocks AeroPEX, Apple's iPods, the uh VMOTA boom mic, all sorts of stuff to see which microphones sound the the best for recording simple video from your phone. Uh links to these different microphones we'll put uh in the show notes and uh in the Amazon storefront full disclosure FTC disclosure, anything you buy uh is gonna obviously generate a non-zero commission for my company Trust Insight, so I will receive some small financial benefit.

None of these uh have been given to me. Uh I had to buy them all. And so uh these are there these companies did not solicit uh these reviews in any way. Uh we have the chemo fun 2.4 gigahertz microphone, a lava layer mic, so all sorts of different kinds of gear for different environments. What you're gonna hear is a test setup uh here in the office off of the phone.

I've got a desk fan running uh that's creates a decent amount of background noise so that you can hear the difference between the different types of mo uh microphones, not only in how much noise they make, uh how well they pick up my voice, but also whether they pick up the surrounding noise or not. So give a listen to this, enjoy it, and then uh if you hear or see a microphone that makes sense for specific use cases uh for your uh uh business, by all means go go grab it and uh and and stuff. I'm not gonna put any prices on stuff, it's just we just want to listen to audio quality, but I can say for the most part, uh well, the the headsets are expensive, but like the the lava layer is like 12 bucks. The headsets are uh three or four or five hundred, depending on where you get them from. Anyway, watch the video, listen to the differences in the microphones.

I'm not gonna edit the audio at all so that you can hear the difference. Enjoy. First test, native iPhone microphone. Have the uh desk fan running here to get uh some ambient background noise. Second test, lavalier microphone coming straight into the lightning jack.

Already I can tell this is a lot hotter. We're peaking a fair amount on the video. Third test, the VMOTA boom microphone, uh, which is this one here, uh head-worn microphone. Fourth test, the David Clark uh Bluetooth headset using the uh uh the boom microphone on this. This is a Bluetooth microphone.

Next test of the Bose QC20 uh QC25s. Uh, this is the Bluetooth microphone built into the the headset itself. Next is the chemophone wireless uh 2.4 gigahertz uh microphone. This is a technically a wireless microphone, but there is a dongle that goes into the phone via the lightning jack. And finally, the Aftershocks uh AeroPex.

This is the Bluetooth bone conductance microphone. That I'm we'll be interested to see how it turns out to see if it's just using a standard air microphone or or if it is using the uh the bone conduction as a form of microphone as well. Of course, how could I forget Apple's own AirPods uh to see how these sound when recording video as well? So got a wide variety of different types of microphones to test here. So there you have it.

Eight different microphones. Now I would say for the type of video creation that I do, which is mostly talking head, the Lavalier sounded pretty good. The uh chemo fun uh head worn mic sounded really good. Uh the boom, the VMoto boom mic also sounded really good. So if I was making videos just in this kind of environment where wired or wireless didn't matter, definitely would use one of those three.

If I'm pure wireless and I want to remain pure wireless, uh the bows were not bad, and the airpods actually surprisingly were not bad at all. They you can tell they're a little more hollow sounding, they don't have quite as much depth. But overall, not terrible. And uh the uh aftershocks were uh a disappointment. And uh the David Clarks, the David Clarks really do sound like you're in a helicopter, right?

So if you are going for that very specific type of effect, these are the ones that have. If you're looking for high failed voice quality for like a webinar, definitely not. You really do sound like you're almost phoning it in. So lots of different options there. In terms of cost, certainly the lavalier is the cheapest.

You can get a halfway decent lavalier mic for like 11 dollars, right? The chemo funds are around $50, which are uh okay. The uh AirPods, you know, $170 dollars that was gonna run you. The V Motor Boom mic is around $30 now, I think. So that's that's quite affordable.

And then the Bows uh had you know everything bows costs an arm and all that. So um so based on what you've heard, based on what you saw, uh, in terms of portability and types of size and terms of stuff you want to lug around, what are you going to choose for the type of uh content you're creating? I would say if you are really concerned about size and you want the lightest possible rig, the AirPods didn't sound horrible, right? They would need some post-production to boot beef things up. If you're okay with um a little bit more cargo, the Lavalier, I think, is probably your your next best choice.

It is wired though, so it's not truly wireless. But again, if you're just carrying around a phone on you know on a stick or whatever, it should be fine. So uh enjoy this. Hopefully it was useful to you and uh it informs your microphone purchases going forward. Take care and talk to you soon.

Oh, and of course, as always, uh leave your comments below and subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.