Moss Parker
1 de agosto de 2024
Excellent lavalier mic once you know it needs to be "powered"
For a concise review, skip to the "Final Comments"I've been a producer and audio engineer for over 50 years. I have a vast amount of experience plugging mics into things that have mic inputs. I understand XLR connectors, how they are wired and what phantom power means. I understand how dynamic and some condenser mics work when they are inserted into 1/4" (or 3.5mm) mic jacks. In all my experience in recording studio environments, I have never encountered Lavalier mics, before.I also teach neuroscience at a local university. Recently, I decided to offer one of my courses in on-line format. For each chapter of the textbook, I provide a PowerPoint presentation with a voice-over of me explaining the slides. I thought this was going to be easy. My first inclination was to put on my high-end Sennheiser headset and just do it. WRONG! When I review my typical voice-over it was riddled by clipping artifacts that I would never have predicted. The human voice is capable of a remarkable dynamic range, and level setting to capture the most low amplitude signals provides way too much gain such that every exclamation causes the inputs to clip. I have an arsenal of audio processors available to me and I was able to tame the dynamics using a limiter and compressor in series. This worked very well and produced a very nice quality recording. However, to do this I was using over $900 in audio gear (including the headset) and I was confined to my desk's chair while I made the recordings. My brain expects the mobility I have while lecturing in the classroom, and doesn't react very well to me looking at PowerPoint slides on my monitor while I try to give a lecture that anybody might be interested in hearing.About a week into hearing me complaining about how many re-dos I was needing to achieve acceptable results, my wife suggested that I should try "one of those little microphone thingies clipped to my shirt like the people on TV use". I knew what Lavalier mics were so I ordered these from Amazon to give it a shot. According to its instruction manual, my recently acquired Zoom H4 Essential portable recorder had a mic input jack that would work with a lav mic. Additionally, the Zoom offers a 32-bit Float recording format, giving it a dynamic range that should be impervious to the dynamic range of my lecturing voice. Since I could put it in my pocket, I would be free to prance around the living room while playing my PowerPoint slices on our 55" TV. This seemed like the perfect plan.When these Lav mics arrived I hurried to plug them into the Zoom and try them out with a mock lecture simulation. I got nothing with either mic. I tried many things, including using both mics and plugging them into 3.5mm to XLR adapters and plugging that assembly into the two XLR inputs on the Zoom. Still nothing. Then I went into the Zoom manual to find out if I was missing something, as a mic is a pretty simple device and it is very improbable that two out of two would produce no signal at all. In looking at the Zoom section input configuration, I noticed an option for the aux/mic input called "Plugin Power". The manual didn't explain the meaning of the term or what it was used for so I Googled it. Apparently, some small condenser mics, including many Lavalier mics require a small bias current (much like phantom power for a normal XLR condenser) to operate. After enabling it on the Zoom mic input both purchased mics operated well.After recording the audio for the 17 slides covering the first chapter, I brought the micro-SD into my studio and transferred the audio to my DAW. Listening to the RAW 32-bit float audio, I was astounded at the clarity with which my voice was reproduced. This was better than than I ever achieved using the $300 Sennheiser headset. Also, the audio was completely free of the compression artifacts that weren't too disturbing but noticeable for me. I was even impressed with the noise floor under the voice recording (it was almost unnoticeable) Even after converting the 32-bit audio to a 56kbps 16-bit stereo stream (to get it compliant with the requirements of PowerPoint), the quality still exceeded my expectations.Final Comments: These Lavalier mics perform incredibly well for the purpose of recording spoken voice. Their frequency response and usable dynamic range are superb for that purpose. I suspect that the negative comments here, especially about those involving "mot working" were probably due to the user not using a recording device that was supplying the required "Plugin Power" (which I have been assured by people who know about that sort of thing IS supplied my almost any device expecting a Lavalier mic to be used with it). Although I can't compare these mics to any other Lavaliers , they perform at least as well as the microphone on a $300 Sennheiser headset. If you want to use a Lavalier mic for the typical kinds of things Lavalier mics are used for, I can't imagine finding anything close to the price/performance ratio these offer!Ver másVer menos
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