Advice for low budget wireless mic

[Ty Ford]

Bonjour Jacob,
Location Sound is a deep rabbit hole, but here goes.
I don’t know what kinds of projects you shoot, I use Sennheiser G2 and G3 and Audio-Technica System 10 (https://bhpho.to/36iCPuO).

WISYCOM, Polsen, Saramonic and Rode and a dozen or so others make wireless gear also make low end wireless systems. https://bhpho.to/3jdY1Fz
There are generally three different RF bands, 500MHz, 1.9 GHz and 2.4 GHz.

I don’t know the t.bone gear either. The one point I see in their literature that causes a question is that they say 24-bit, 44.1 kHz resolution. That’s virtually impossible in the 2.4 GHz range without data compression. How much data compression is used determines the quality of the audio. The other side of that equation is latency. How many milliseconds of latency exist between the time the audio is picked up by the microphone, gets converted to digital, is transmitted and converted back to analog at the output of the receiver? More than 3-4 milliseconds makes it very difficult to deal with as a sound mixer. Is that system latency I’m hearing in my headphones, or is there a reflective surface somewhere nearby. If it’s just latency (and that’s bad enough) fine, but when I get back into post and hear the audio, will I also hear that latency?

Which of these will work reliably in any situation is the question. I have no direct experience with them.
Usually, as the price goes down, so does the build quality. Will a cheaper system last four years? How well do you or your talent treat the gear? I have G3 and G4 gear that’s over 10 years old and still working. I have System 10 Audio technica gear that is almost that old and is still working.

Will they work for you? How much interference exists where you’re shooting? What is the range? Range is somewhat determined by power, but twice the power does not provide twice the range. All of these factors are why many people hire location sound professionals with gear you’d never buy yourself. And, hopefully, they know how to use it better than you! (no offense)

Regards,

Ty Ford

Cow Audio Forum Leader

[Mark Suszko]

My 4 cents is, you can often get better gear on the same budget, if you buy used versus new. And you get even more value for the price if you can rent. $170 is not a lot for a rock-solid wireless system. That’s like the price level for a mediocre office meeting room PA system lav (IMO).

$170 is however more than enough to rent a real quality wireless lav system for a day or two. If this is a paid gig, I’d try to budget for the rental and bill the client, plus a little markup. Of course this assumes you have a pro AV rental outfit located in your city or willing to ship to you from nearby. A place like that is good to get to know.

As far as buying used, if you stick to the well-trusted brands and reputable sellers it can work out well. I’ve bought several mixers that way and was pleased at the value for money.

Last cent: if realtime reception isn’t a deal-breaker, you can often do better than a wireless lav at any price level, by using a wired lav going into a small digital audio recorder hidden on the body, even if its just an iPhone. No RF or signal drop-out problems. Synching it up is pretty easy now in modern NLE’s that will do it for you automatically. I find iPhones do surprisingly good audio recording. This is what we used to call shooting “dual-system”, and in my wedding video days it was how you guaranteed at least one audio source was going to be solid. Wired lavs that can plug into a phone start in the 20-dollar range and go up quite a bit but you could find something around $100 that would suit your needs. The phone BTW could be a used one from the pawn shop and need not be activated with a phone service for it to still work fine as a camera or recorder.

[Jacob Giacometti]

Hey Mark,

Thanks for your suggestions,

I am always in the middle of nowhere so for me renting wouldn’t work,

I liked your suggestion of using a wired mic if wireless was absolutely not needed though.
But then you enter the insane twisted world of using the doomed 3 rings minijack input of your phone to plug the mic in, which in my experience always turned out very approximative ! Hmmm…

[Jacob Giacometti]

Thanks TY for this in depth analysis.

Yes I agree indeed about all the additional factors you mentioned,

I am just trying to find a low cost solution for a side project that does not require studio quality audio, just trying to find how to get the best results for how much money I’m prepared to invest in.

I think latency wouldn’t be the worse thing as it seems acceptable (to me) to just move back the soundtrack a few frames to get it to match perfectly if needed.
If you have any model recommendations that would fit the budget, even if yes indeed they will have shortcomings, I’m interested.
Thanks !

[Ty Ford]

Jacob,

The simplest answer would be to boom the shots. An AT4053b. Do you currently have a boom mic. Boom mics are more COVID friendly.

Also, as a resource, there’s a Buy/Sell forum on JWSoundgroup. https://jwsoundgroup.net/index.php?/forum/23-want-to-buy-want-to-sell/

Regards,

Ty Ford

Cow Audio Forum Leader

[Mark Suszko]

Doesn’t have to be a phone, you could get a used TASCAM DR series pocket sized audio recorder, or something similar, and do the same trick.

[Jacob Giacometti]

OK.
In the 120-170$ budget ?

[Jacob Giacometti]

Ok thanks; It’s just for recording me otherwise yes I love boom mics too

I’m in France so I’ll have to find it somewhere else :p

[Jacob Giacometti]

ah yes it seems so ?

[Mark Suszko]

A quick scan shows a used TASCAM DR05 like I own could be had for around 50 bucks; the rest of the allotted money would go towards the best wired lav you can buy for that remaining money, used or new. Those two discrete components could end up doing numerous different jobs, too. I appreciate your budget constraints as I live in that same neighborhood, so to speak. When you don’t have money you need to apply imagination.