I Bought a Recording Jammer. It’s Legal.

you know what Society is like these days if I just come out and say and that sound bite hits the internet boom cancel and with the number of people working here that would be a pretty rough day for a lot of hardworking families but guys I got to be me and if I can't loudly Proclaim that then how could I even drag myself to the office every morning that is where this little guy comes in it discreetly prevents your conversations from being recorded on someone else's phone hidden microphone or voice recorder and as you can tell when I say I don't know uh it even works against the professional lavalier microphone that I'm wearing it's not perfect though and it comes with some serious downsides so before you trust your most intimate secrets to one of these bad boys you should probably watch past this super edgy Saveway to our mothering sponsor ug green their Nas sync dxp 480t plus comes with a 12 gen Intel processor 8 gigs of expandable ddr5 memory and dual Thunderbolt 4 ports plus its onboard AI assistant makes file management a breeze check it out at the link down below the marketing images for the f11 antio recording bug wire tapping audio 37 emission hole of ultrasound interference anti EES dropping spy device device are a gold mine of dubious claims the recording Terminator 37 launch heads anti-ice recorder recording it even claims to have anti- video recording uh here let's try it can can you guys see me when I flick the button okay well that last one seems to be nonsense but how does it disrupt the sound recording the way that it does is it just blasting out white noise so loud that you can't hear me no because believe it or not when you guys are hearing that mess from the Jammer none of us in the studio are picking that up we can all hear each other just fine I can hear it okay but you have headphones on let me explain many of you will already know how microphones work here's a microphone shaped like a cookie good job but for everyone else the tldr is that they typically contain a thin membrane called a diaphragm that gets vibrated by incoming sound waves that vibration is turned into an electrical signal Amplified and the rest of the details don't really matter for now what does matter is that a microphone's response to different frequencies of vibration is nonlinear meaning that it varies from high-pitch noises to low pitch noises this weakness is what Jammers like this one can take advantage of by blasting out sound waves at frequencies that are higher than the typical human can hear they can shake the mic's diaphragm around like crazy in the frequencies that we can hear and make it impossible for a hidden mic to pick up my secret confessions we're going to link a couple of papers in the description if you want to get into the math for how it works but for now let's look at this clip that we recorded earlier with a calibrated measurement microphone wow just from looking at the waveform it's pretty obvious where the Jammer turns on and where the Jammer turns off but what's happening at the different frequencies this right here is a spectrogram and it visually represents the intensity of sound waves in each frequency from 0o Herz at the bottom all the way up to 90 plus kilohertz up top the brighter the display the more intense the sound waves are at that frequency let's blow this up though and take a closer look we mere humans can typically only hear sounds in about this range right here from 0 to 20 khz or 20,000 Herz of course that's when we're young and it tends to narrow as we age especially at the high end but as you can see over here that's not really that big of a deal given how much of human speech takes place within that range of course once the Jammer kicks in you wouldn't have any chance of making out any sounds with this level of intensity with all of this noise this still doesn't tell us the whole story though and hence let's zoom in on just a second or two of our jammed section here you can see right here is where our Jammer turns on all of the high-intensity sounds are being generated above that range of human hearing but by choosing specific intervals they're able to induce vibrations that spread to cover the entire spectrum and you can see that once you've got this much noise it's basically impossible to make out regular human speech and it's not just our crappy meat ears that are defeated by this check this out I've got a speech to text app on this phone and with the Jammer turned off the app does a pretty respectable job of transcribing what I'm saying but as soon as we turn the Jammer on and the AI would have no idea that I just confessed one of my deepest darkest secrets so that's it then video over uh everyone go buy one of these uh see you later no not quite you see the advertising heavily features corporate boardroom type use cases for it so to validate that we set up our Jammer in our meeting room and ran a few experiments starting with probably the least realistic scenario where our recorder here isn't trying to hide what he's doing the Jammer works admirably but that's not a huge surprise even AliExpress specials like this one rarely completely don't work at all what was a surprise though was that we almost exploded Elijah's head the first time that we turned it on and he didn't have any hearing protection it's really aggressive go again as it turns out just because most mere mortals can't hear what's coming out of the Jammer some can and some especially can for this reason while devices like this are legal here as far as we can tell we have no data whatsoever on the long-term health and safety effects of using a device like this and their use could be either dangerous or restricted by your local government so your mileage may vary on that note let's turn our attention to a more realistic scenario where at least one of us call at least one of us is trying to hide what we're doing our spy now has his device on his lap under the table and since we don't trust each other I probably don't want him to know that I have this Jammer so I've hidden it next to this potted plant what it's a common plant the ca are I just activate all three switches so we're blasting out in all directions and then I can say regardless of the hiding spot the result ended up being about the same there's enough noise bouncing around in the room to mess up the recording however if our Target is sensitive to high-pitched noises like the whine of an old tube TV they're likely to know that something is a miss and if our spy tries to get even a little bit sneakier by tucking their recording device under their clothing especially under a couple of layers of clothing well watch this guys I'm about to reveal that snake kills Dumbledore and there's nothing anyone can do to prevent me from being an any questions Colin sure the point is it turns out that again regardless of the relative positions of our recording device and our Jammer a couple layers of cloth are so effective at blocking these super high frequency noises that they do a remarkable job of reducing its Effectiveness which got us thinking up until this point all the mics we've tried have been tiny either literally tiny like these mems or Micro electromechanical Systems microphones like you would find in a phone a voice recorder or a smart home hub or figuratively tiny like the small diaphragm condenser that you would find in the measurement mic or my lavalier these two types work a little a little bit differently from each other but what they both have in common is tiny thin diaphragms that are easily bounced about in the ultrasonic storm that's created by the Jammer but of course there's a lot of other types of microphones so we rounded up a bunch of examples laid them out and managed the cables with our new magnetic Cable Management from LTT store.com each mic was tested at the same distance with the mic pointing straight at the business end of the Jammer and we found was that it was quite effective against most of the mems mics and small condensers even including our shotgun microphone not every mic Was Defeated however and our first surprise was the sanken cost 11d which is actually the lav mic that I normally wear as it turns out its diaphragm is rotated 90° inside its tiny cylindrical housing so even head on the sound waves from the Hammer weren't actually hitting the diaphragm in a direct path which significantly reduces the jamming effect if we check out the spectrogram there's none of those zigzaggy lines that we saw before at all another one that was interesting was the zoom h1n recorder that uses two small microphones in an XY configuration and we found that while both did experience significant jamming the one that wasn't pointed directly at the Jammer picked up the voice quite well which prompted us then to test all of our mics either 45 or 90° off of the source of the interference in addition to our head-on tests so our final standout then after those tests ended up being come on the mk416 shotgun from Sennheiser not only did it handle the 45 and 90° tests like a champ but with the Jammer half a meter away blasting down the barrel it was jammed and then as soon as we pulled back to a meter it was like the Jammer wasn't even there looking at the spectrogram we can see it is picking up what the Jammer is throwing down but it's not having a significant effect on the diaphragm at other frequencies we think there's a combination of factors that are likely contributing to this while the shotgun still has a relatively light diaphragm if I were to compare it to a dynamic stage mic for example it's still larger and heavier than the other small condensers that we tried making it a little harder for the Jammer to abuse especially as the mic gets farther from the source also the element is tucked away deep inside the mic behind this section called the interference tube which basically makes the mic more directional especially as the frequency gets higher the result is that less of those super high frequency waves from the Jammer are going to bounce all the way down the tube and mix together to mess with our recording but as good as it is it was no match for larger diaphragm condenser ERS or dynamic microphones like the venerable sh sm58 or our broadcast quality r20s from the L show so in conclusion yeah it works but it's not the Silver Bullet that the advertising would have you believe pretty typical AliExpress against a casual attempt to record a conversation it's surprisingly effective but it should be noted that it makes a pretty unsettling noise that kind of feels like pressure on more sensitive ears and also realistically a narell could easily hide a heavy diaphragm mic up in the ceiling over the conference table and catch me off guard that way then again if they've got that kind of access to the building they could probably just take me out directly instead of waiting for the Pitchfork wielding mob so I 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Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,338,426

Keywords: audio recording, recording jammer, ultrasonic jammer, ultrasonic noise, microphones, mems, hidden recorder, clandestine recording, spy mic, hidden mic, spoilers, noise, ultrasonics, audio, sound recording, sound jamming, mic jamming, phone jamming, we jammin'

Id: FyeCn7HlLck

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 27 2024