Lav mic tutorial, troubleshooting & comparison!

Clip-on mic allows you to remove the background noise and room echo when you are recording audio and video, but is it actually better than the in-built microphone you have in your smartphone?

If you watch this video, you will see that a cheap lav mic compared to a more professional Audio-Technica ATR3350xiS mic does not make much of a difference on my Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 5G phone, because the cheap AD converter is the real bottle-neck that lowers the sound quality.

Analog-to-Digital converters in consumer electronics vary a lot in their quality, and if your device has a cheap AD converter, no mic will sound good through that.

I believe that this Audio-Technica lavalier mic can sound much better when recorded with a better quality recording device. Unfortunately my HP Envy laptop recorded actually WORSE audio quality than my phone, which was disappointing.

However, the sound quality can be improved to an extent in any audio or video editing software that has an EQ, equalizer (for some reason I said equalisator, lol) and compressor. In this case, I'm using Hitfilm Express to edit my video, and it has the options to adjust the volume of different frequency bands.

This tweaking helps a little to give the sound more brightness and presence, but it can easily distort the sound and make it sound funny.

The options I came up with are either buying a better phone/camera, or a separate digital recorder like Zoom or Tascam.

You can hear at the end how different the sound quality is (use your headphones) it's apparent that EQ does make a difference, but I'm still not satisfied.

If you are using Hitfilm Express as your video editor, you can download my preset from here:
https://scriiv.com/share/Clip-mic-EQ....
Right-click on Clip-mic-EQ.hfpr and save it on your computer.

The default path for HitFilm Express presets is:
C:\Users\[YOUR_USERNAME]\Documents\FXHOME\HitFilm Express\Presets

! Check my Raleno shotgun mic video to see how to use custom presets:
   • Raleno V30 mic - Get better sound with you...  

Looking forward, I'll probably buy a better recorder with two mic inputs so I can record with both of the lav mics to have two people on my videos and get a superior sound compared to the potato quality I'm getting now.

Hit a like and subscribe, it gives me confidence to keep making new videos. And please ask me any questions if something was unclear.

Thanks!