Better Audio For Your WFH Video Conferencing – Part 1

Nowadays we do video conferencing all the time during Coronavirus lockdown with Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex, Google Meet. You may wonder if it is possible to improve the audio quality during the conference meeting, if you’re not happy with your computer built-in microphone.

You can of course attach an external microphone to your computer, mobile phone and camera. This post shares how you can do it with your laptop computer (in this post, Macbook Pro), iPhone, DSLR camera (Olympus E-M1 Mark III) with an 3.5 mm external microphone. The next post will share with you how to do it with an USB based external microphone with your computer and mobile phone.

There are many good external microphone that makes use of the 3.5 mm plug. The one I show here is the BOYA BY-MM1 Shotgun Video Microphone. The BY-MM1 is compact, light weight and housed in aluminium. It also includes an anti-shock mount,which can effectively reduce unwanted vibration, cable and handling noise. Lastly, it includes a furry windproof shield, which specially used for minimizing the wind and environmental noise for outdoor recording.

To make it work with your computer, iPhone and Camera, there are some tricks however:

1. For laptop, just plug in the cable comes with BOYA to the 3.5 mm plug of the computer. For some reasons, I tried both the TRS and TRRS cables with the microphone, both work perfectly.
2. For iPhone, you however need Apple Lightning to 3.5 mm Headphone Jack Adapter.
3. One point to note for this computer and mobile phone set up if you want to use it to record audio, make sure you unplug the microphone then you can replay the audio clip with the built-in speaker. You can of course plug in your preferred headphone / earphone for that as well.
4. For camera, also just plug in the cable to the 3.5 mm jack with the camera. However, since there is no battery with the microphone, you need to set up your camera to provide power to the microphone.

Here are some pictures of the microphone and setup !!