lightning stereo microphones for iOS

By Cory K, 15 June, 2017

Forum
Apple Hardware and Compatible Accessories

I need a stereo mic for my phone. I read in a forum that some devices broke speech. What are people using these days? I'm not buying hooke audio's device. I've used it. It's an over priced piece of crap. I'll use something wired. Any ideas?
Thanks!

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Comments

By Sof on Friday, June 23, 2017 - 00:53

I've personally bought this one, Shure MV88 condenser microphone. I'm not exactly an audio guru but I was looking for something which would suit my needs in various situations: singing, recording voice and particularly recording sound outdoors. The mike is built in metal and it's well manufactured. It is powered by the lightning port and can be turned in various directions. No buttons but you can use Shure Motiv app on the App store, which is 100% accessible. It offers you 5 presets you can choose from to adapt the sound to the situation or you can fine-tune the stereo wideness, the compressor etc to suit your needs or even record your stuff flat to do the processing afterwards if you so prefer.

It's a bit expensive but the numerous reviews you'll find on the Internet should convince you that it's worth the money. Here is one of them.

HtH,

Sof

By Erion on Friday, June 23, 2017 - 00:53

Personally, I really like Zoom's IQ6. It has a very low noise level, and the microphones are adjustable, and are very good quality. It comes with a windscreen for field recording.

By Cory K on Friday, June 23, 2017 - 00:53

In reply to by Erion

This is the one I went with. I realized however, that since I have an iPhone 7, if I want speech, I'm going to have to use the lightning to 3.5 adapter. I'll have to plug the zoom and the headphones into that. Anyone have any info on this?

By Piotr Machacz on Friday, June 23, 2017 - 00:53

AFAIK, the IQ6 has its own headphone jack that can be used for monitoring and I suspect it also it will root all your system audio to it as well. So, it will act as a headphone adapter on its own.
What I'd be interested to know is, if you plug in the IQ 6, or any other lightning mic one of you has tried, do you lose speech until you plug in headphones into the microphones headphone jack? And if so, do you get the "audio destination" option on the rotor so you can put the audio back on the iPhone speaker like you can if you have a bluetooth speaker connected? I'm considering getting one of these for spontaneous audio recording because the iPhone's mic is good, but mono and I miss the stereo recording capability of Android phones I owned. However, it's unlikely I'll have time to set up and plug in headphones in these kind of situations so I'd be interested to know how easy it is to use one of these with just the iPhone's speaker.