I wish someone would invent this wireless mic...

D

dslr_sc

Active member
I do a fair amount of run and gun video shooting where I need to grab quick interviews and sound bites from people on the street. I usually use a shotgun mic for this but sometimes I am in very noisy environments so I was thinking how much better it would be if I could quickly clip a wireless lav mic to the subjects clothing. The key word here is "quickly"... all of the current wireless lavs have belt packs that are about the size and weight of a deck of playing cards, and it's not always easy to clip this on a subjects clothing. When I've used them I often just ask the subject to hold on to the transmitter, but of course, then you have the dangling cable.

What would be excellent is a tiny wireless lav transmitter that was either part of the actual lav mic or maybe attached to the back of the clip that holds the mic, so it would it be hidden by the clothing (assuming you attached the lav clip to a jacket or button down shirt).

I believe I saw a Sony Bluetooth lav mic that sort of does what I'm suggesting, but I don't think its received great reviews and is not really considered "pro" quality.

It just seems odd that there have not been major advances in shrinking the size of wireless mic transmitters and receivers over the years... they're still basically the same size they were from 10 or 15 years ago. Are the R&D tech folks at Senheiser, Samson and Sony not even trying to make their equipment smaller and lighter?

Another observation: camera makers have been adding the option to stream video to a smart phone, tablet or the net... why not a built in wireless mic capability?

This forum seemed to be a good place to vent about this. I have half a mind to launch my own Kickstarter campaign to raise money for inventing a tiny wireless lav mic... unfortunately I have no idea how to build such a thing.

Maybe someone here knows of a solution I have not tried?
 
Why not a kickstarter campaign to raise funds to add a boom op to your team?

Or say an RE50 mic with a butt plug?

If you have the coin there are the Sennheiser SK 5212-II, Lectrosonics SM series.
 
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dslr_sc said:
This forum seemed to be a good place to vent about this. I have half a mind to launch my own Kickstarter campaign to raise money for inventing a tiny wireless lav mic... unfortunately I have no idea how to build such a thing.
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Which is why your kickstarter would fail.

It's clear you aren't an engineer. No one gets to avoid the laws of physics, including you and me. It takes power to transmit, which means batteries. Where are you going to put yours? It takes an antenna to transmit on the legal frequencies. Where are you going to put yours? And, it takes some amount of surface area to dissipate the heat caused by the transmitter; Lectrosonics and Zaxcom have already shrunk their wireless transmitters to the point that they catch some complaints about how hot they get in operation.

Thing is, no one cares about small and convenient when the device sounds bad or is unreliable. So the big push in wireless has been to improve the range of reliable transmission, the sound quality, and battery life.
 
What the OP is asking for is just physically impossible. It cannot be done with current technology on many levels. What doesn't defy the laws of physics are a boom op or a handheld mic.
 
davefisk said:
What the OP is asking for is just physically impossible. It cannot be done with current technology on many levels.
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But on TV and in movies we frequently see high qualty-audio pickup from concealed bugs the size of a dime, and from across the room.
Or at least that is what we see IN FRONT of the camera.
 
The OP does bring up a good general point though. Its seems as though audio technology in general is lagging behind video, stuck in an old paradigm. I actually think improving sound quality is more of a software problem then a hardware one. I read this interesting article about how much processing our brains actually do to make our hearing noise free. http://www.moultonlabs.com/more/microphone_vs_the_ear/P0/ Some of it is due to the structure of the ear and the fidelity of it but not all of it. Someone should invest time and money into making sound recording smarter and not just reliant on decades old hardware models.
 
Maybe in 20 or 30 years from now with the rise of graphene-based devices like transistors and batteries and Gigahertz radio band transmissions. (the greater the bandwith, the smaller the antenna get)

Until then... get real.

Audio technology lagging behind video... yes and no.

HD audio was there way before any affordable HD camera was available. Something like 10-15 years ago. What is still lacking is a popular format/medium. Nothing that would come in this age where music has become like a tissue. Use it then throw it in the trash. But that's for an other discussion on how it is 'consumed".

But it's true that there was no major breakthrough from the standard PCM model, apart DSD. MP3 and lossless compression like FLAC are an advancement in a sense, but not in the one of having a "better quality" (here the goal is to compress data with a lossy or lossless codec)

Again, laws of physics are there. Just for an example that will speak to everyone : the smaller the capsule of a microphone, the noisier it gets. The 2 major miniature microphones manufacturers in my opinion, Sanken and DPA, already propose incredible quality devices in regard of their size. But it's for really specific applications (namely, lavalier microphones), although DPA propose their 4060 for music recording too (a variant but same size). But you will never see a lavalier used for recording a voice in a studio, it will mostly be a large diaphragm condenser microphone.

Also, generally, most miniature microphones are omnidirectional and directivity can't be changed. You need electrical (dual diaphragm capsule) or acoustical (e.g. mechanical cancellation) "tricks" to change directivity pattern, thus making for a big mechanical construction.
 
S.Blanchardon said:
Maybe in 20 or 30 years from now with the rise of graphene-based devices like transistors and batteries and Gigahertz radio band transmissions. (the greater the bandwith, the smaller the antenna get)

Until then... get real.

Audio technology lagging behind video... yes and no.

HD audio was there way before any affordable HD camera was available. Something like 10-15 years ago. What is still lacking is a popular format/medium. Nothing that would come in this age where music has become like a tissue. Use it then throw it in the trash. But that's for an other discussion on how it is 'consumed".

But it's true that there was no major breakthrough from the standard PCM model, apart DSD. MP3 and lossless compression like FLAC are an advancement in a sense, but not in the one of having a "better quality" (here the goal is to compress data with a lossy or lossless codec)

Again, laws of physics are there. Just for an example that will speak to everyone : the smaller the capsule of a microphone, the noisier it gets. The 2 major miniature microphones manufacturers in my opinion, Sanken and DPA, already propose incredible quality devices in regard of their size. But it's for really specific applications (namely, lavalier microphones), although DPA propose their 4060 for music recording too (a variant but same size). But you will never see a lavalier used for recording a voice in a studio, it will mostly be a large diaphragm condenser microphone.

Also, generally, most miniature microphones are omnidirectional and directivity can't be changed. You need electrical (dual diaphragm capsule) or acoustical (e.g. mechanical cancellation) "tricks" to change directivity pattern, thus making for a big mechanical construction.
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But you're still thinking in the old paradigm, that it's all hardware based problems. I'm not talking about audio quality in terms of recording quality (compression, HD audio, etc). I'm talking better selectivity, reduced reflections and noise. Our ears do all this work in conjunction with our brains. I think a combination of better software and hardware that can fully exploit that software could yield better results.
 
A few years ago on another A/V forum, there where frequent inquires stating "where can I get a recording, wireless or video device which was used on the TV show CSI" or other fictional program..
 
combatentropy said:
In light of tiny Bluetooth earpieces, how can you say this?
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Because an 'ear piece' only need receive and have enough power to do that... I'm sort of in passing knowledgeable about 'miniature' receiving devices for hearing aids, and it is 'amazing' how one can buy Bluetooth headphones for $20 or less... yet a 'bluetooth' option for a hearing aid can be thousands...

The problem with wireless is interference, and the power needed to transmit, especially 'analog'. Digital gets away with doing tricks these days to send data with forward error correction, or retransmission if needed, etc. to 'get the data across'... Analog on the other hand, if there is a noise hit... well, it's recorded right along with what is desired...

In terms of 'costs of development', since anything wireless requires FCC (or any other country's regulatory body) approval, there are costs involved with just getting the equipment through that process, even if your intended frequency of operation is in an ISM band like 900 MHz, 2.4 or 5.8 GHz.

If the audio is for an 'interview' then perhaps some sort of local recording with wireless monitoring. Perhaps that would not satisfy some, but that may be a 'cheap' way to do this.

You could perhaps even prototype that sort of scenario with a couple of iPhones, (or smart phone to your liking...), and a cheap mic.
 
Rick R said:
A few years ago on another A/V forum, there where frequent inquires stating "where can I get a recording, wireless or video device which was used on the TV show CSI" or other fictional program..
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LOL...But hey, about 50 years ago everybody wanted one of those Star Trek communicators and what we got in our pockets now is arguably superior. I still maintain that audio recording technology for cameras, at least on the consumer/prosumer level, needs a ton of improvement and there is room for innovation.
 
Batutta said:
But you're still thinking in the old paradigm, that it's all hardware based problems. I'm not talking about audio quality in terms of recording quality (compression, HD audio, etc). I'm talking better selectivity, reduced reflections and noise. Our ears do all this work in conjunction with our brains. I think a combination of better software and hardware that can fully exploit that software could yield better results.
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Indeed. No one is denying this.

My Masters thesis was on real-time AI. And I'm telling ya that what you're asking for is a long way off. It's right up there with nuclear fusion, which has been twenty years out since the 1960s. And still is. Sigh...
 
j1clark@ucsd.edu said:
Because an 'ear piece' only need receive and have enough power to do that... I'm sort of in passing knowledgeable about 'miniature' receiving devices for hearing aids, and it is 'amazing' how one can buy Bluetooth headphones for $20 or less... yet a 'bluetooth' option for a hearing aid can be thousands...

The problem with wireless is interference, and the power needed to transmit, especially 'analog'. Digital gets away with doing tricks these days to send data with forward error correction, or retransmission if needed, etc. to 'get the data across'... Analog on the other hand, if there is a noise hit... well, it's recorded right along with what is desired...

In terms of 'costs of development', since anything wireless requires FCC (or any other country's regulatory body) approval, there are costs involved with just getting the equipment through that process, even if your intended frequency of operation is in an ISM band like 900 MHz, 2.4 or 5.8 GHz.

If the audio is for an 'interview' then perhaps some sort of local recording with wireless monitoring. Perhaps that would not satisfy some, but that may be a 'cheap' way to do this.

You could perhaps even prototype that sort of scenario with a couple of iPhones, (or smart phone to your liking...), and a cheap mic.
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While I agree that what the OP wants is not available at a quality level that would make it useful, your explanation is not correct.

Bluetooth devices receive and transmit, so that isn't really the issue. The issue is quality distance and size. The "tiny" bluetooth devices are still bigger than what the OP wants. And they transmit a very short distance and the quality of sound is well cel phone quality, and that is not going to fly with anyone taking sound at all seriously.

A side issue is that they don't get a lot of battery life and the batteries are built in. You couldn't make them removable with out wasting space, so you are stuck with pretty short runtimes.

So I would argue that you could make one today but it would be a very short range and poor audio quality unit with not much run time. Not much of a market.
 
While it may seem that audio is slow to develop as compared to other technologies, engineers are not sitting on their hands. They want to advanced the technology, wow their customers, and be competitive as much as any other sector. Electronics and software simply can't do what the brain does. Even cameras today, with all of their technology cannot do what the brain does for vision.

Take lighting. Our brains auto-compensate for color instantly. Stand in a fluorescent-lit room. Look outside. The colors look correct to you. Now turn around and look inside the room. The colors also look correct to you. You don't see a green tinge. The brain automatically knows how to make the colors look like they should. Cameras can't do that.

The same goes for audio. Have a conversation in a loud restaurant. There are 10-20 conversations going on with lots of noise. Yet you can pick out just the one conversation, seemingly without echo and you can filter out all of the other conversations and focus on just the one; even where there are two or three conversations going on at your table. Software can't do that. As said, we are likely to solve contained nuclear fusion before we can do what the brain does.

The speakerphone industry has been working on the echo cancellation and room noise problem for decades. They still don't have it down. They have made improvements, but it is just a bugger of a problem. So as soon as they have it sorted out, you can bet everyone else will use it. But it just isn't there yet and it won't be. As already said, nothing replaces getting a high signal-to-noise ratio than getting a microphone close to the subject.

Here is a video demonstrating what one company in the speakerphone industry is proud of. To us, the sound is terrible. But for them, it is breakthrough technology. That's where it stands today.

http://www.clearone.com/beamformeraudio
 
Richard Crowley said:
But on TV and in movies we frequently see high qualty-audio pickup from concealed bugs the size of a dime, and from across the room.
Or at least that is what we see IN FRONT of the camera.
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LOL - science fiction, of course.

A concealed radio bug picks up a very narrow frequency range as it's designed just for getting speech quality that is understandable.

For a full frequency range and high quality you need a much larger transmitter.

The Sennheiser mentioned earlier is probably the smallest around - and it's not cheap.
 
Batutta said:
LOL...But hey, about 50 years ago everybody wanted one of those Star Trek communicators and what we got in our pockets now is arguably superior. I still maintain that audio recording technology for cameras, at least on the consumer/prosumer level, needs a ton of improvement and there is room for innovation.
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Arguably? Okay, I'll argue it.

The communicators on Star Trek were essentially walkie-talkies with extremely long range. They didn't require nearby cell towers and landline cabling, or orbiting geosynchronous satellites, in order to work. So no, we don't really have anything in our pockets that we could take to, say, even the Moon -- or, more realistically, a desert island or a cave deep in the Earth -- and be able to talk to each other on.
 
David W. Richardson said:
Arguably? Okay, I'll argue it.

The communicators on Star Trek were essentially walkie-talkies with extremely long range. They didn't require nearby cell towers and landline cabling, or orbiting geosynchronous satellites, in order to work. So no, we don't really have anything in our pockets that we could take to, say, even the Moon -- or, more realistically, a desert island or a cave deep in the Earth -- and be able to talk to each other on.
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As walki talkies yes those were a lot better. But the computer in your phone probably has more power than the one that ran the ship, and it has video, and you can play solitaire on it!

On the other hand I never saw them charging those communicators. I want one of those batteries.
 
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