Seacue budget lapel microphone
My quick test of a cheap lavalier microphone with actual audio recorded on PC and Android phone (Moto G4).
Doing reviews and setting up my ‘studio mic‘ is sometimes a bit cumbersome and it can get in the way of things. Solution: a clip on lapel mic like this one (affiliate link*)!
As you’ll see in the video the audio is perfectly acceptable for what I need it for. For £9.95 it’s almost a disposable purchase so even if it doesn’t last long it’s not a big deal.
It’s got a 3.5mm jack which is wired for plugging straight into a phone’s headset socket. That means it needs an adapter to plug it into a mic input socket like on a PC. Seacue supply 2 adapters, one for pluging into a PC/mic input and another (I think) for phones that have slightly different wiring. If it doesn’t work plugged straight into you phone, use the adapter. On my Moto G4 Plus it works without an adapter. However, the stock Motorola camera app cannot record from an external microphone so I use Open Camera instead.
What made be choose this one?
There are plenty of cheap mics like this on Amazon. When I’m looking to buy something cheap and cheerful like this I don’t spend too much time searching. I filter on ‘Prime only’ as that’s a quick way to narrow the results to only items fulfilled by Amazon and therefore a good chance they ship to Cyprus. Then I use the Amazon Shipping Filter Chrome plugin which lets me hide the remaining products that don’t ship to my default address, in Cyprus.
From the ‘shortlist’ I chose this one from Seacue. It came with the required adapters and had a reasonably long cable. I measured the cable at 1.9m (not including the 3.5mm plug and the actual microphone) which is close to the 2.0m in the product description. In the video I refer to a claimed 5.6ft but that was taken from one of the product images.
Here’s a link to the microphone on Amazon (affiliate link*) (opens in new window).