MOVO X3 II Budget Shotgun Mic: Quality Audio for Cheap?!

in this episode a budget microphone from moo called the X3 version two let's go ahead and get you some sound samples versus the Sennheiser mk416 completely not a fair comparison but that's our reference mic the Sennheiser so here we go it was easier to know it than to explain why I know it if you were asked to prove that two and two made four you might find some difficulty and yet you are quite sure of the fact it was easier to know it than to explain why I know it if you were asked to prove that two and two made four you might find some difficulty and yet you are quite sure of the fact it was easier to know it than to explain why I know it if you were asked to prove that two and two made four you might find some difficulty and yet you are quite sure of the fact it was easier to know it than to explain why I know it if you were asked to prove that two and two made four you might find some difficulty and yet you are quite sure of the fact so the X3 version two is an affordable medium shotgun microphone directional meaning it will pick up what you want it to pick up and less of the sound around you and the noise around you so that's fantastic I think it has for its price a surprisingly Rich broadcast style sound when it's powered with 48 volts phantom power from the recorder or your camera with an XLR input we'll come back to that and talk about that in more detail it does include uh everything you need it includes a r coat shock mount a foam cover a fur cover a short XLR cable which is made for if you're going to mount it on top of your camera running it into the XLR input of your camera a short XLR to 3.5 mm camera same thing except if you're going to run into your camera that has a 3.5 mm input padded removable hand grip a/4 in to 38 inch adapter so you can put this on a boom pole and then finally a zipper pouch so really everything you need for $129 that is actually pretty amazing so you can power it via your camera or your recorder with phantom power plus 48 Vols or via internal able a battery it does have a 150 HZ high pass filter to filter out some wind and maybe other low frequency noise like air conditionings it won't completely remove it but it will help be careful with that it can also cut into your voice a little bit especially men's voices not so much women's voices but definitely men's voices it will pick up less base when you turn that filter on now one of the things with budget microphones in particular is that they tend to be noisy they tend to have this hissy noise that they make on their own not noise that's in the space that it's recording but just noise that they generate on their own through their ronics this one did decently actually it came in when we did our practical noise floor sample so I come into this room turn off all the lights turn off anything that's generating noise I record some dialogue and then I leave a silent portion while where we record I bring all that into post production boost it to a standardized level -23 lufs and then measure that silent portion that came out atus 64 DB RMS Max with the bulk of the noise sitting closer to- 69 so that's not the cleanest I've ever seen obviously but it's also respectable for a microphone of this price I think it's definitely usable the build is primarily metal very very solid so it handles that well there are a variety of samples that I have for you here first up let's do a siblin sample she sells seashells by the seashore by the seashore she sells seashells overall seems like it handles siblin nicely doesn't overemphasize it so that's good let's also take a look at the polar pattern to see what that does in terms of how much noise it rejects from the back and the sides and also if it changes the sound character when it's off axis in other words kind of coloring what you hear so let's go ahead and work our way around the microphone so here I am directly on axis I'm going to go ahead and turn the microphone so that it's 90° I'm now 90° off axis and I will continue to turn the microphone now I talking into the back of the microphone approximately the same distance from the microphone capsule now I'm coming back to 90° off axis so I am 90° off axis and we'll go ahead and bring it back around so that I am one 0° I'm completely on axis at this point so there's again a sense of the off-axis coloration and how much it Rejects at the back versus the front of the microphone I would say that it does color the sound a bit uh as you move off axis especially at 90° however that's not unusual for shotgun microphones especially more affordable shotgun microphones but I think it's still again very usable for someone that is working on a very tight budget but wants quality dialogue sound all right we need to do a Max sound pressure level test that is how loud of a sound can this handle and I'm not great at yelling or Screaming it's I would not call this a microphone that's necessarily for recording really loud sound effects like jet engines from a couple meters away and I don't really yell that well so I do know someone that does I'm starting off a low volume I'm going to be raising my voice voice up louder and louder so that we can hear how loud this microphone can go because if it goes really really loud it should be able to take everything that you throw at it and if so it's going to be a great microphone to use for whatever you want you want a glass of water only if you spike it with Advil it did seem like it was starting to distort some at the microphone we were using the mix pre3 set to 32-bit float mode so it wasn't the recorder that is clipping and technically the waveforms are not clipping but it does seem like there's a little bit of distortion there so even with somebody screaming sound speeds Allan thank you very much if you're interested in learning from a boom operator that works in the industry for television and film definitely check out his YouTube channel sound speeds it did seem like it was getting a little dodgy there so if you are planning to do a lot of screaming maybe this is not the best microphone if you're going to do a lot of indie horror movies for example how about PIV PIV are when you say the letter P or B or sometimes even T there's a little puff of air that comes out of your mouth sometimes that can distort a microphone as well at normal distances probably not as much of an issue but let's do some samples here Peter Piper picked a peeg of purple pickled peppers not hearing any issues there and with just the foam cover Peter Piper picked a peck of purple pickled peppers and without any of the covers at all Peter Piper picked a peack of purple pickled peppers so at the typical distances you would normally use a shotgun microphone 18 in 45 cm PIV are not really a problem if you're going to use this for podcasting and get really close to it that's when you can start to run into posive issues you should use the foam cover in that case and what you might do is move the microphone off to the side still aimed at the corner of your mouth but that way when you're talking and you say P or B or whatever you're not going to get that puff of air directly into the microphone so you shouldn't have any posive issues we did some tests with a variety of things that generate radio frequency including a phone and a wireless microphone trans Transmitter near the microphone we had no issues with Wi-Fi with LTE with making a phone call with wireless microphones and so this seems to definitely reject radio frequency noise which is fantastic we also did some tests to see how well this would handle wind especially with the included foam cover and the fur cover let's take a look at that okay here is the lowest [Music] setting setting number two setting number [Music] two setting number three setting [Music] four and setting five don't need to do a lot of that we're going back to the lowest setting let's put the foam cover on here is setting number one we're hearing the fan but we're not hearing the Distortion of the wind hitting the microphone capsule setting number two actually does okay setting three not too bad setting four definitely Distortion and setting five and utter Distortion okay back to the lowest setting and we're going to go ahead and put the fur cover on okay and here's with the fur cover on lowest setting setting two setting three setting four and setting five starting to hear a little Distortion there but this actually the fur cover does better than I expected so so overall I would probably say these are probably good up to about 10 m an hour roughly winds so if you're going to be working out where it's going to be windier than that you're probably going to need the proper sort of blimp type cover for your microphone but otherwise these are pretty helpful they do cut out some of the high frequency response so you may have to do a little bit of EQ and post to get some of that back so some of the crispness is taken out when you put things like foam and fur on top of your microphone what about handling noise so if you're going to be using this on a boom pole which is actually what I would recommend then you it's really important that you have shock mounting because what can happen is if you're if you're holding the pole and you're moving it around and your hand is rubbing against the pole that can transfer into the microphone and just create all this noise that you don't want that's what a shock mount does it helps isolate the microphone from any vibrations of the pole and the included shock mount did a pretty decent job you still need to use good technique but it's amazing that they again for this price that they include raot shock mount so really nice now I just mentioned about using the microphone on a boom pole and in fact this entire episode is being recorded with the moo X3 version 2 right here just boomed out of the frame in front of me on a boom pole if you're planning to use this on a camera it can sound very very different like this here's a sample of what it sounds like when the microphone is on top of the camera the camera is approximately 2 and 1 12 to 3 m from where I'm sitting right now so pretty typical for an interview type setup this is what you can reasonably expect this is a Canon C70 it does have XLR input so that's what you're hearing here the moo X32 into the Canon C70 via XLR input when we're talking about budget microphones a lot of is be People's First microphone that they buy so I wanted to make it clear that where you position the microphone makes a world of difference if you're going to put it 2 and 1 half 3 meters away on top of your camera it's not going to sound as good as if you boom it right out of the frame here and that's not just his microphone that's all microphones it's a laws of physics so just be aware of that the microphone comes with a one-year warranty and that can be extended to 2 years if you register your microphone with moo at their site and it is as I mentioned before priced at $129 us for the this kit at the time of the review so that's a fantastic price for what you're getting now no product is perfect let's talk about some of the cons first of all when we attached this microphone we put it on top of our Panasonic gh5 just a kind of a hybrid consumer camera and use the included XLR to 3.5 mm cable and put a ablea battery in the microphone to power it this is what it sounded like all right here is a vlog example I am talking to a Panasonic gh5 with the moo X3 version two up on top here going directly into the Panasonic gh5 with the included XLR to 3.5 mm cable that comes with the mic this is what it sounds like I had to set the input level to -5 uh it ranges from I think 0 to min-2 so it's about halfway a little bit more than halfway this is what it sounds like it seems like when you run the microphone using a ablea battery that the character of the sound changes pretty pretty significantly from my point of view so I just want everyone to be aware that if that's how you're planning on using it it may not be the best if you're going to put it bring it into an audio interface or a field recorder with XLR inputs or a camera with XLR inputs and you can power the microphone using 48 volts phantom power from one of those devices it's going to sound more like everything you've heard in this video up to this point except for that one sample that I just shared where we were running it into the gh5 so what I'm saying is that if you're planning to run it and planning to power it via AA battery and run it into your hybrid camera with a 3.5 mm input the sound quality is to me much thinner sounding not as great I also mentioned this before if you are going to put the foam cover and the and the fur cover on because you're filming outside that's good because you'll prevent the noise of the Wind from distorting the microphone capsule but you do need to be aware that you're going to lose some of that high energy or high frequency sound and you may need to do a little bit of boosting in post to get that back to get that nice crisp sound back and as I mentioned before there is some coloration when the sound is coming from off axis in other words at 90° off to the side of the mic or from the back of the mic especially to the side of the mic to my ear so that's not unusual for a microphone a shotgun microphone in general but especially for a budget one so overall I would say that the moo X3 version 2 is a pretty darn impressive microphone for $129 does that mean I'm going to sell all of my Mor expensive gear and just use this $129 microphone from now on no it does not uh however it is a pretty impressive microphone for its price so I hope that was helpful for you if you have any questions go ahead and leave those down below get out there and make some great sound and we will talk to you again very [Music] soon