Sony's outgoing Bluetooth camera mic - a review
Added 2021-03-11 10:58:02 +0000 UTCIf you’re planning on running a successful YouTube channel that appeals to the widest possible audience it’d be very unwise to make a video review of a discontinued Bluetooth camera microphone that only works with certain Sony cameras.
So here it is:
Regardless of its guaranteed lack of success, I’ve enjoyed making this video, managed to get out of the house and had a bit of fun with it.
It’s not always all about the views, at least that’s what I’ll keep telling myself.
In other news I was on Radio 4 this week talking about Lou Ottens and the compact cassette. As you no doubt know, he is credited as the creator of the cassette and passed this week at the age of 94. You might (dependent on your location) be able to hear the program here.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qtl3/episodes/player
It’ll be the episode for Wednesday 10th March 2021. The section I’m in starts at 40:12 on the streaming version or 33:17 on the downloadable one.
Up until now I’ve always turned down interviews because they want to talk about me - and I’m not interested in doing that. However this time they told me they wanted to talk about the tech - so I thought why not give it a go.
Apparently the show, which goes out each weeknight, has around 1.75 million listeners worldwide (it's also played on NPR). Not a bad audience for a radio show nowadays. I’ll confess to never having listened to it myself though.
If you’re interested in hearing a bit of behind the scenes, I can always talk about it in the next update. I prepared quite a bit of cassette history stuff that in the end wasn't asked about, so I'm planning on making that into a video now.
Hope you’re all still doing well. I didn’t manage to reply to many comments on the last video, so if you’ve got any unanswered queries, please post them here and I’ll do my very best to answer all of them this time.
Have a good one.
UPDATE
I’ve re-uploaded this as a result of feedback regarding video compression issues with the first version.
UPDATE 2
I’ve re-uploaded this again - this time to clarify the details around the hiss tests.
Comments
That's more self preservation than anything. There's a lot of people don't believe anything unless I show it. It was a bit of a pain to do though. I had to change the camera to 1080p, set it to output the on screen menus over HDMI then hook it up to a video capture device. I'd never tried capturing a camera menu before this one.
Techmoan
2021-03-27 21:40:15 +0000 UTCHey Mat! You might think this is silly, but around 4:35 -- the picture-in-picture video showing the camera menus -- the way you execute these kinds of things are one of the many reasons why you're the best out there. You could have just shown the "Function is currently disabled" screen (or nothing at all), but you showed from a few steps back how you got there. I know it may seem like a small thing, but I (and everyone else here, I'm sure) really appreciate your meticulous presentation.
Michael Jordan
2021-03-27 21:22:48 +0000 UTCVery interesting Matt. I do wonder how much of that noise-floor comes from the microphone AGC, how much comes from the transmitter's preamp and how much comes from the bluetooth link itself - BT audio uses very aggressive compression. It would be interesting to compare the relative noise with the microphone operating in complete silence, with intermittent sound (like speech - which you could edit out in post to get a sample of the noise-floor in normal use), running but with the input muted (ie. an external mic. plugged-in but switched off) to get noise from the entire audio chain and with the transmitter turned off to get only noise produced in the receiver. I was considering buying one of those to conduct such tests, but like you said, eBay prices are optimistic to say the least..
Gordo
2021-03-25 16:15:45 +0000 UTC
