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

[meltycrayon]

To get past security, do you think would sticking it to the back of your phone like a phone grip would work?

Is anyone going to look at it closely enough to determine it's a recorder? I wouldn't even take it out of my pocket. Last show I went to, I had an Instamic Pro C in one pocket, and my lucky silver dollar and a neodymium magnet in another, and neither set off the wand. It's not a gun, knife, or vape, so it's probably not going to get a second glance.

[Ozpeter]

To get past security, do you think would sticking it to the back of your phone like a phone grip would work?

Some of those mushroom things have a circular kind of spiral pattern on the back - make that the display image and it might help. I think I will try that right now...

[Ozpeter]

Here you go - a little while back I attached a sticky metal disk to the back of my phone (I got a packet from Amazon a few years ago) and the Mic Pro holds onto that like a limpet, particularly if I use the supplied magnet thingy.  I guess if showing a guy your phone while holding it they wouldn't see what is underneath it anyway - or if put on a table type surface, phone screen up, they would assume it had a holder behind as it wouldn't lie flat.  And if they glanced at the back, the image on the Mic Pro kind of looks like the back of a holder.  Well, slightly...

Pics attached, hopefully... you could download the design I used to your phone and use that to customise your Mic Pro display.  Or not.

[Ozpeter]

If anyone read the two posts I have just deleted, I embarrassed myself by incorrectly assembling the MS pair I was comparing to the Mic Pro.  Idiot.  And so the comparison I did, and uploaded to YouTube, will now have to be done again from scratch.  This is what happens when you get old.  But on the other hand, it shows that while some traditional mic techniques can be totally done wrong, you would have to work hard to make a mistake with the Mic Pro!

[Ozpeter]

So here's my video of my tests of the Mic Pro vs the Sennheiser MKH 30/40 MS rig, which costs about 30 times more.  And it is massive in comparison.  And takes a fair bit of setting up.  

- I don't make money from my channel.

I incorporated relevant frequency plots in the video rather than clutter this discussion with them.

Overall, to my (elderly) ears, there's not a vast difference between these two rigs.  Certainly less difference than there seems to be between the Mic Pro and other low cost portable 32 bit float stereo recorders with built in mics I own. The chief difference is probably due to the inherent difference between MS audio and 'normal' audio.  

It seems to me that this is a groundbreaking device - but apart from people here, nobody seems to have cottoned on to it.  I've not seen other YouTube videos focussed on its use as a stereo recording device - others just see it as a another wireless mic system only for use with video.  Oh well.  Time will tell. 

[mccordo]

Overall, to my (elderly) ears, there's not a vast difference between these two rigs.  Certainly less difference than there seems to be between the Mic Pro and other low cost portable 32 bit float stereo recorders with built in mics I own. 

After watching your video, I have to agree that the difference between the 2 rigs is not that vast. In an ideal (open) taping situation I would much prefer to use my DPAs or AKGs, but the Insta360 seems plenty good enough to my ears for those times when using a full sized rig is not practical or feasible.

[Ozpeter]

https://youtu.be/8jx27TrEYn4

In this unmonetized video, I present comparisons between the Mic Pro and six other devices, namely

Zoom H1 XLR with Superlux S502 mic
Zoom M2 MicTrak
Zoom M3 MicTrak
Zoom H2 essential
Zoom H2N
Sony A10

together with various displays.  I also added a comparison with the EQ that I find works well on the Mic Pro.  I have to say that my ears tell me much more than the frequency response displays, but maybe that's just me.

The video goes for about 1 hour 20 minutes, but I've set up chapter markings in the description so anyone seeing it can jump around from one device to another and draw their own conclusions.

In about 10 days time I may get a rare chance to try it out at a live jazz gig.  Fingers crossed.

[chewed]

Last night I taped Jimmy Eat World with both the Instamic Pro Plus C Stereo and the Insta360 Mic Pro in "cardioid" mode. Being that I had them mounted on different areas of my person, I can't offer a true A/B comparison, but my initial observation is that the Instamic Pro Plus C sounds significantly mid-scooped compared to the Insta360. The Instamic has mega high and low end, while the Insta360 sounds pretty neutral to me, but bass-heavy. I may actually try the bass roll-off feature next time, but all-in-all, the Insta360 sounds far more accurate to what I heard in the room. Both setups will require EQ for a more pleasing final result, but I think the Insta360 is a far easier jumping off point than the Instamic. My hunch is that the Instamic has some built-in V-shape coloring for content creators so that audio sounds "sweeter" right out of the box.

The Insta360's 32-bit stereo does seem to be legit; all peaks were recovered after normalizing in Audition. Also, the included windscreen with the Insta360 seems to do the trick; the venue I was in last night, a covered outdoor amphitheater, has huge fans on the ceiling to keep the crowd cool, and I have not yet detected any wind noise from those.

Do note that the Insta360's app does the same thing that the Instamic's app sometimes does, which is that the app/your phone disconnects from the device while recording. This does not stop your recording, it just unpairs your phone and the device to use the controls via your phone. When I noticed this after the show was over, I simply turned off the Insta360 manually with the power button, and all was well; the entire show was still there. I'm not certain what would happen if you tried to re-pair the device to your phone. Ironically, the Instamic app kept ticking the whole show!

I'm very keen to continue experimenting with the Insta360. At $99, only time will tell how the unit holds up, but there's serious potential for our uses here.

I would be interested to hear samples of this and the Instamic Pro Plus to compare, even though the mounting was different. I have 2 Instamics myself and I wonder how different the Insta360 is.

[Ozpeter]

(not a monetised channel).

After all these years of contributing (hopefully!) here, I have made my first recording of a blues band performance.

It was in a small Irish pub here in Melbourne which I had never visited before.  It was packed.  In order to get in, people were having to squeeze past the band by the doorway.  The only place I could stand to record the band was about 2m away from them.  In the video, my proximity is evidenced by the photos!  

And the Mic Pro took it in its stride, despite the high levels hitting its little mics.  When editing, I zoomed right in to the highest peak, and it's not clipped at all.  The recording represents very well the sound of the band.  The vocals seemed to be coming out of a speaker somewhere behind me for some reason, way off to the left - a bit strange but the Mic Pro has captured that accurately, warts and all.

I had the Mic Pro attached to the underside of the peak of my baseball cap, with its LED lights off, practically invisible, and that worked very well, although I had to keep my head still to avoid sudden changes in the stereo image.

At the end of my visit I kept recording as I walked out and down the quite busy city street in which the pub stands.  But because the high level of the band audio is so reduced in editing (in the normalisation process), the city ambience at the end is more or less inaudible.

The recording was split at 2Gb (I think it is) and the join is just fine.

Frankly i think this device is close to unbelievable.