Topic: Insta360 Mic Pro - New wireless mic with 32-bit stereo internal recording

[Ozpeter]

fyi these are $85 on amazon right now. not sure if it's a prime day deal or not, but thought I'd mention it

Thanks for the tip! 

[Ozpeter]

I've just got back from the local festival where there was lots of high-quality amplified music (for on-stage dancers etc), and some actual musical performances - and I am extremely pleased with the recordings on the Mic Pro.  A lot of it was as loud as I would care to expose my ears to, but no distortion visible on the waveforms.  The result will be on YouTube in the next 24 hours, link to follow.

Luckily when I accidentally knocked my Mic Pro from the magnetic mount I was using, while fiddling with my video camera, I realised at once, and managed to spot it in the night-time grass....  No harm done.

And - just before I left the house, there was a firmware update for the Mic Pro - and it seems they may have changed how the "processed" internal recordings are created.   In my early tests some of the settings such as EQ didn't seem to do anything, and I think that's something they have fixed - I will test it shortly.  But my festival recordings were captured using the "original" setting, and there's no change in the audio that I can hear. 

[Ozpeter]

https://youtu.be/AYckdDIFqnQ

My channel is not monetized.

Here is my 40 minute recording at a local outdoor festival, which I think demonstrates the qualities of this tiny device very well.   There are various amateur music and dance acts performing live or to recorded backing tracks, and I've included some ambient audio captured while walking round the festival site.  There are chapter markings so you don't have to listen to the whole thing... just skip from section to section if you don't have 40 minutes to spare!

The fact that it's in the open air of course helps avoid colouration of the audio by a building's internal resonance, but on the other hand the sound quality of the amplification used by some of the acts has a significant effect on the outcome.  Fortunately the guys operating the PA really knew what they were doing in my opinion, with the sound being presented in stereo and with a good undistorted wide frequency response.  Wind was light but I used the optional wider wind muff to be sure.

At no point did I hear, or see in the waveforms when zoomed right in, any clipping at all.  I stood close to the stages, and the sound level was as much as my elderly ears could handle, frankly.  And today I don't seem to be hearing much... For each recorded file, I reversed the channels (as the recorder was mounted upside down beneath the camera), added some HF boost to brighten the sound which does seem to be needed, to my taste, and then I normalised the result.  During a couple of recordings, there was an "untypical transient" which dictated the normalised level to be a bit low, so I used a limiter to trim just those peaks by about 3dB - the value was chosen so that only the single transient peak was actually affected.

While getting the audio and video tracks lined up in sync, I switched between hearing the camera audio and the Mic Pro audio, and although I have always thought the particular camera has good audio, I could tell that it was very compressed in dynamic range compared to the Mic Pro uncompressed dynamics.  Quite an eye opener.  Or ear opener.

All in all, this experience makes me feel that the Mic Pro really is a ground breaking device, in terms of its size and audio quality, and its ease of use - all you can do is to turn it on and press record!  I am forming a plan to use it to record some kind of classical music performance, on a well-placed stand - I really do think it would do a perfectly good job for capturing archive or radio broadcast audio very, very simply and very, very unobtrusively.