Do you use a mic for better audio for mobile phone recordings?

If you've ever recorded a great video on your phone only to discover that the audio is muffled, echoey, or overwhelmed by background noise, you know how frustrating poor sound quality can be.

❌ Figure: Bad example - Tiny mic will be too far away when recording yourself

Viewers will often tolerate average video quality, but they are much less forgiving of poor audio. That's why using an external microphone is a simple best practice that dramatically improves the quality of mobile phone recordings.

While modern smartphones have excellent cameras, and built in microphone technology is getting good. But when recording yourself, the phone is rarely close enough to your mouth for good clean audio recording.

Choose the right microphone

There are many excellent options for wireless microphones these days, and most of them come in different forms of compact solutions. Let's explore a couple of styles and why you would pick them.

⭐️ Recommended - Dual Wireless with Audio Monitoring on the Receiver (RX)

✅ Figure: Good example - Adam's new mic, a balance of performance and portability

These microphones are excellent. They give you several different options for audio filtering, which allows you to set the clarity level of your recording based on the environment that you're in. Also, because audio levels are shown on the receiver, you can make sure that the input levels are high enough to have a strong signal to use when editing. A bonus feature is the built-in internal recording capability as a handy backup and a raw version for cleaning up the noisiest recordings. And everything is housed and charged in a single carrying case.

Dual Wireless with Compact Receiver on phone

🙂 Figure: OK example - Rode's ultra compact on phone reciever with dual mics

This microphone setup is a great option if you like to do vlogging or journaling because for the space of a Bluetooth headset, you've got a microphone set up, it plugs directly into your phone for the recording. One of the cons is that you don't get onboard recording and at the same time you can't see audio levels, so there's a fair amount that's automated, but with the on-phone app you can do some testing and get your recordings dialed in for a great video.

Hononable Mention

What happens if you don't have the budget for the high end, but you still want some of the performance features that come with the more expensive version. DJI makes a mic mini two that keeps a lot of the filtering options available to capture clean sound, and yet has a reasonable price tag.

Figure: DJI Mic Mini 2 is a budget friendly option for solid performance

Final thoughts

People will forgive slightly imperfect video, but they quickly stop watching when audio is difficult to hear. Investing in a good external microphone is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to improve the quality of mobile phone recordings.