Consumer vs Pro Wireless Microphone Systems

in this episode let's take a look at the differences between consumer level and pro level wireless microphone systems [Music] for purely educational purposes I want to take a look at the differences between consumer grade or maybe prosumer grade wireless microphone systems and those on the pro end now first of all as an example here I've worked with the rodelink pretty extensively that's about a $400 per microphone channel cost for those the Sennheiser g3 and now the g4 with the lavalier mic they usually run about $600 per channel and then we'll also take a look at the audio limited a10 digital wireless system which is a new pro level system this runs about twenty four hundred dollars per microphone channel now the question is is why so much why does the pro level cost so much more does it just sound that much better well yes it sounds somewhat better and we'll come back and take a closer look at that in another episode but I want to talk about feature wise why pros choose to use much more expensive gear and what features attic more expensive gear has that is really beneficial for them now first of all let's talk about the difference between professionals and those who are making films on a sort of passion hobby basis there's some pretty big differences now first of all as far as professional location sound mixers are concerns of sound recordists they make their living doing this if they mess something up they don't necessarily get another job from that same client and so they're not making as much money so for them if they want to eat and they want to be able to pay for a place to live and sleep they have to get their job done right and they need to do it as efficiently as possible and they need to deliver reliably and consistently so having a tool that's super reliable and super consistent and gives them the flexibility and the power they need to deliver is very important to them one of the other things is important to pros is they have to be able to fulfill the requirements of the job they're doing and in some cases that's going to require things that the consumer-level wireless systems don't have so for example they may need to be able to connect high-gain antennas to be able to reach farther distances reliably one thing that's really important for pros is they must not be the cause of incurring additional costs for the producers or the project that they're working on that is to say they shouldn't be the cause and as much as possible of needing to do retakes of needing to do automated dialogue replacement that is to say having this after come back into the studio after the shoot is done because some of the audio wasn't good and have them rerecord their lines this is the last thing that an audio sound mixer wants to be responsible for so it's imperative that they get really good production sound whenever possible now for professional sound mixers it's important that they're able to deal with and manage and correct issues with RF transmission whether that means they get any sort of RF hit or interference whether the signal drops out they need to be able to kind of manage that and be able to solve those problems while they're on set and so some of the consumer-level gear doesn't allow them to do that very effectively whereas the pro level gear is set up so that they have all that flexibility to solve those problems now on the other hand for the enthusiasts passion filmmaker hobbyist for them they're mostly self-funded and so they can't generally afford really really expensive gear they're already investing in cameras lenses lighting sound gear so they don't necessarily have twenty four hundred dollars to spend per microphone wireless channels so for them that's just not even an option completely makes sense another unique feature of this group is that they usually have more time than they do budget to spend on it more expensive gear so for them if they do have to do a retake it's not usually as catastrophic usually and frankly in some cases they have lower production quality requirements so if you can get something that's good enough for the particular audience you're delivering to then that's good enough so let's take a look at three different wireless systems with which I have personal experience they kind of fill the spectrum of say sort of mid to maybe higher end consumer all the way up to the professional level first up is the road link now I have probably the most experience with this system I've been using it for several years now since it first came out I would say this is probably the high end of the consumer realm maybe moving just into the prosumer realm it's an all digital system and it uses the very crowded 2.4 gigahertz frequency this is where all the Wi-Fi traffic is now this of course is a challenge because you don't have any settings on this system to make changes and to work at different frequencies it's locked in a 2.4 gigahertz and if something's not working in the location where you're shooting it's not working so you either have to switch to a different wireless system move to Wired microphones or come back tomorrow and hope it's better then unfortunately there aren't any settings you can change to deal with this issue and I think that's one of the kind of defining differences between consumer level and pro level now to keep this in balance I've had good luck probably over 99% of the time there are only been a couple of circumstances where things got out of control and I couldn't fix the issue on the spot and I had to move to a different wireless system so there are trade-offs there on the positive side the road link is dead simple to use you don't need to know a lot of things about wireless transmission to effectively use the road link wireless mic system so you literally turn on the receiver turn on the transmitter you set the gain level which is just a switch and you're on your way one kind of downside and I guess upside depending on how you look at it is that the receiver and the transmitter for the road link system are actually pretty large so it's somewhat difficult to hide that transmitter on the talent if you need to do that and for narrative filmmaking often that's a requirement the positive side of that is that there are no external antenna so it's a plastic build and the antenna is internal so you don't have any sort of antenna in the way so that's something to keep in mind as well it's a positive it's a con and I would really say for a lot of passion filmmakers that's not necessarily going to be a big issue in terms of costumes usually you can conceal it enough to be okay but on the professional level shoots sometimes they're going to be full body shots and so hiding the transmitter is really critical so that to the point where you shouldn't be able to see it through the costume at all so having a smaller transmitter is pretty important in those circumstances with the rodelink system the included lavalier microphone the røde lavalier is decent but it's not amazing and in fact I've experienced some interference issues with that especially as you kind of wind the cable up to take up the excess and kind of tuck it away in a pocket I found that that a lot of times will create interference at the transmitter so it's not the most amazing lavalier microphone in the world but on the other hand it comes with a lavalier microphone where the pro systems don't that's a separate expense that you have to incur one thing that's really nice with the road link is that it has only a 4 millisecond latency which actually some people might kind of freak out about that that's actually quite good for a digital wireless system some of them have latency ZUP 219 milliseconds so Sennheiser AVX for example now it's doing some other things the a/v exit is actually doing some much stronger encryption for milliseconds is actually quite good for something priced at $400 u.s. lest anyone think I'm criticizing the road link too much I've used this in small paid jobs as well and gotten very good results so it's not as if you can't make great audio with this system you can out of the box it's really made to work with consumer grade cameras with 3.5 millimeter microphone inputs and the little cold shoe adapter so you can mount it right on the camera you bypass a mixer altogether it's made to be very simple it's made to be something that almost anyone can use so it's really kind of aimed at a very different audience out of the gate one thing I've noticed too is that the locking plugs for the different cables that interconnect the different devices the receiver and the camera or the microphone and the transmitter they're supposed to be locking where you turn this little nut to lock them but it doesn't work very well I've really had a lot of struggles to get those to attach and stay attached so that's another sort of downside moving on to the Sennheiser g3 and g4 wireless microphone systems I'm using the simple body pack transmitter kit with a very small receiver there are also rack mounts II receivers and other things as well but I'm just trying to stick in the same sort of category here these actually have some benefits over the road link even though they're using a analog transmission method I would definitely put these in the prosumer realm and actually they're used on a fair number of professional gigs as well in terms of build is pretty solid I would say definitely more solid than the road link system with a lot more metal and the overall build there are still some plastic parts the door that opens to conceal the batteries is plastic but overall a much heftier more sturdy type of feel to it this is sort of the old school analog transmission type of device where you can actually choose the frequency so already out of the gate you have more flexibility with this to work around interference issues so if you're getting a lot of interference you can do a scan choose a different frequency and get back to work along with that additional flexibility of course comes more complexity so you do have to understand how these systems work - first of all by the right frequency range for your particular locality you have to be very careful and make sure you get the right kit for your locality because certain frequencies are legal to use in certain localities and not legal to use in others so first of all you have to figure that out but also the whole process of setting up and choosing a frequency takes a little bit more and some practice and expertise the transmitter on the Sennheiser g3 and g4 systems is significantly smaller than the road link so it is easier to hide on your talent and for example I use these Ursa straps to hide them oftentimes around the waist of a talent it just makes it a lot easier to conceal the transmitter you can use a lot of different even professional-grade lavalier microphones with this the kit typically comes with the me2 lavalier microphone from sennheiser which to be entirely honest is not the greatest lavalier microphone in the world again it sounds horrible on my voice for example for some people it sounds ok not the best microphone in the world so while it's included if you are gonna use this system you may want to also look at investing in a higher quality microphone as well the MK ii ii from sennheiser in my experience is a very good lavalier microphone and sounds good on almost all voices the problem of course is that it costs quite a lot of money and additional four to five hundred dollars on the bright side the g3 and g4 system are virtually latency free because they are analog transmitting systems there's not a lot of processing that has to take place and so there's not a lot of latency now latency as the delay from when the person actually speaks to the time that actually gets to the recorder and in this case again virtually latency free a couple of other things this system has saved me when the road link wasn't working I had to switch to the g3 and the g3 did a great job it saved me in those circumstances what I also find is that if you have to transmit through walls and things of that nature the g3 and the g-forces to my thing do quite a bit better than the road link digital system so if that's ever requirement and I actually had a circumstance where there was a corporate shoot where we had to have the mixer outside of the room from where the talent were and so this was a lifesaver in that circumstance now analog wireless systems generally use a topology where they have a compander a compounder is something that compresses the audio at the transmitter sends the audio to the receiver where then it expands the audio again and this can have an impact on the audio quality with the Sennheiser they've done a pretty good job implementing it but there are still some times when things can start to sound a little weird so there's a little bit of sacrifice in some circumstances in terms of audio quality on the pro side you can output a much stronger signal from the receiver to line level on your recorder so you can essentially bypass the microphone preamplifier on your recorder if you need to do that so you get a little bit more flexibility there as well in addition it comes with both a 3.5 millimeter and an XLR output cable so you can see again this is very much more aimed at the prosumer type of recordist the locking 3.5 millimeter plugs work much better on this system they actually lock reliably which is a nice feature and then also this system does come with a shoe mount so if you do need to mount it directly to your camera in some cases and this would mean where it's more of a prosumer type of device where it's aimed more at videographers but some sound recordist use it as well overall it gives you some flexibility and then finally let's look at the audio limited a 10 digital wireless system this is very much a pro level system and you can see that on a number of fronts first of all the build quality is solid all metal this thing is made to withstand the rigors of production life and things happen I've had talent dropped the transmitters when they were trying to take them off because I generally like to let them at least start to take them off like you know assist them and kind of walk them through it but I've had them drop them and things of that nature so this is going to stand up I think quite a bit better than something like a road link which is all plastic build impressive audio quality as you would expect for something that costs this much so for example I was told by Kish Patel when I interviewed him at NAB this last year that this system the a10 system was actually used for the boom operators in the new Star Wars solo movie so in other words what he was saying was that the audio quality is so good with this system that they're actually using them for boom mics now in the past traditionally that hasn't been the case they've always for the most part wired the boom mics because wired sounds it so much better but now they've gotten to a point where the wireless on the a-10 system sounds so good that they go wireless with the booms as well which is a really interesting evolution one important thing is built into the a-10 transmitter is an analogue limiter for those of you not familiar with the concept of a limiter when you're doing digital recording the trick is is that if you have an input level is set too high and suddenly your talent over modulates or gets louder than you expected what will often happen is you will clip and distort the signal that's just the nature of digital systems the nice thing about an analogue limiter is it will catch that modulation or that suddenly getting loud and pull it back before it gets converted to digital so it will prevent it from clipping and distorting which is a really nice feature this is a great example of where this is a benefit for the pros they can now be in a situation where if the talent do over modulate they can actually have a fine take they wouldn't have to do a retake whereas on some of the more consumer grade wireless systems they would clip in distort and so they would have to make a decision do we do a retake do we do dialogue replacement and post what do we do now after the audio is converted to digital in the transmitter its transmitted in digital form over to the receiver and then from the receiver you have a couple of different options you can output an analog signal at line level so you can bypass the preamplifier of your recorder or you can actually output AES digital so rather than convert it back to analog at the receiver you can actually just feed a digital signal straight into your recorder if your recorder can take that and a lot of the professional grade recorders from sound devices Zacks comm and others can take a digital signal so what that does is it only goes through the analog to digital conversion process once as opposed to doing it multiple times like you do with the road link the a-10 also has an industry-leading two millisecond latency which is the best in the industry for digital wireless as far as I'm aware and that works really really nicely another very unique thing is that the transmitter can supply 48 volt or 12 volt phantom power so what that means is that rather than just use lavalier microphones with your wireless transmitter you can also use boom microphones so shotguns small diaphragm cardioids so we're now moving into an era where we can do wireless boom microphones as well which is a really nice advantage to support that there are some optional accessories you can buy an actual mounting plate for your boom pull so you can mount the transmitter right on your boom and also the free pin lemo which is the input for the microphones - an XLR adapter so again you can hook up those XLR based boom mics now in terms of size of the transmitter and receiver the transmitter is very similar in size to the Sennheiser g3 although it has more kind of curved edges which to me I think makes it a little easier to hide on your talent you never want hard lines and edges so that's one advantage on the receiver side though it's a much larger receiver and there's an advantage to that believe it or not it is actually made for operating from a sound bag or from a slot system if you're not familiar with the slot systems what these are they're sort of RF distribution and power systems where you can slot in multiple receivers power them all with the single battery and connect higher gain antennas to them to achieve greater transmission distances so there's some definite advantages there as well now these receivers are also different from the standpoint that they are powered externally so there's no inbuilt slots for double-a batteries or any other sort of battery you actually connect it to a power distribution system that most sound mixers have in their audio bags so that you power everything in your bag wireless receivers the recorder and mixer all from a single larger capacity battery so these are really made for that as well so what that means is these are really not made for mounting on top of a camera so if you're shooting a DSLR or a mirrorless camera there's no cold shoe mount for these and it's rather large so you probably wouldn't want to do that either so you can see again this is very much aimed for professional use now you buy the a-10 system in pieces so you buy the dual channel receiver and you buy the transmitters separately and also the transmitters do not come with microphones so that's good and bad from the good stand point you're not getting a kind of suboptimal microphone that you're not going to want to use anyway like you are with more consumer-oriented systems on the other hand that means you also have to buy a microphone so that $2,400 per channel doesn't even include the microphone most professional level lavalier microphones are probably about $200 and up a lot of times in lis maybe 300 to 400 dollar range outside of the US because of patent restrictions in the US the transmitter also has a couple of additional features it has a built-in recorder so that if you do experience any sort of radio frequency drops and you lose signal it's still recording to a card within the transmitter which is a really nice feature as well and also it has a built-in timecode generator so that'll make the process of syncing up the audio that's recorded in the transmitter much easier down the road in post so some really nice features there as well unfortunately not available in the United States because of some patent restrictions I believe from zachsk um I would say the menu system on the a-10 is actually quite easy to use that's not always the case with pro level gear but in the case of the a-10 it is pretty straightforward and easy to use without a ton of diving into menus there is also an Android and iOS app that allows you to remotely change the settings on the transmitter now this is not like a long-range type of thing you have to be pretty close to the person wearing the transmitter but what it's useful for is making small gain adjustments if you need to do that in between takes or if you need to kind of mute the system for a break and things of that nature if the Talon has to go use the restroom that makes it easier you don't have to dig it out from underneath their costume you can actually just walk up to them use the app to mute it and they're on their way you can also change the output power on the transmitter from 10 milliwatts to 20 milli watts or 50 milliwatts that's a really nice feature for mixers who know what they're doing because this way they get a choice do they need longer transmission distance or what they prefer to save on battery so that's kind of the trade-off there it's really nice to have that option the dual channel receiver for the a-10 system is actually a wideband receiver so it can cover a much wider frequency range which also gives you more flexibility to again work around different interference issues when you're out in the field what's interesting about the a-10 is it also comes with a variety of different antennae that are optimized for different frequency use so you can really really fine-tune things and get the best possible signal quality and of course when you have the receiver in one of the slot systems you can also hook up high gain antennas third-party antennas that allow you to increase the transmission distance even more so again much more flexibility here now one other thing that's important to understand as far as why these are priced so high relative to the consumer and prosumer level gear is that these are not mass-produced products these are products that had a lot of research and development my understanding is that the a-10 system was in development for about 10 years and so there was a lot of engineering that went into it to produce the feature set that we're seeing here and again they're not produced in mass quantities so there aren't those economies of scale that you typically see with more consumer-oriented gear when they're producing a lot the cost for the company to manufacture it comes down significantly and so they can pass those savings on in the price that's just not an option here just because of all of the research and the engineering that went into it so just something else to keep in mind when it comes to those what seem like ridiculously high prices on professional level so overall I hope you understand the difference between consumer and prosumer and pro level gear as far as wireless microphones are concerned with this discussion there's obviously a time in a place for each of them and I just wanted to kind of educate you so that at some point when you are called up to work on the next Star Wars movie or whatever your favorite series of movies are so you have the information you need to understand why the pro level gear is so much more expensive and why it may make sense to add that when you get to a certain level of production and you can feel good about your decision to use the more consumer-oriented gear when you're working on passion projects knowing you can still get very good audio quality so I hope you found that helpful if you have any questions go ahead and leave those down below if you've not already subscribed make sure you do that and we'll be sure to get you more great videos on how to improve your lighting and sound for video and if you'd like to be notified each time a new episode becomes available go ahead and hit that Bell icon will talk to you soon [Music]

Channel: Curtis Judd

Views: 124,783

Keywords: audio, sound, video, film, wireless, microphone, mic, system, RODE, RODELink, Sennheiser, G3, evolution, Audio Ltd, Audio Limited, Audio Ltd A10, audio limited a10, pro, professional, consumer, prosumer, compare, comparison

Id: ed4o2lzYIfo

Length: 21min 19sec (1279 seconds)

Published: Sun May 27 2018