Good Budget Wireless Lavalier: Azden PRO-XD
One of the most common questions I've received from YouTubers: "I'm going to start a prank channel at YouTube. What wireless microphone should I get?"
I've never done a single prank video so I don't pretend to be a master at understanding all the nuances of quality prank videos, but Azden was kind enough to send me a copy of their PRO-XD Digital Wireless Lavalier system to review.
After working with it for about three weeks, here’s the review. Overall, this is a great budget digital wireless lavalier system priced at $200 USD. While it isn’t as robust as more expensive wireless systems, this system does have a lot going for it and is very good value for money.
The upside? Great performance in terms of keeping a signal, battery life, and producing solid, quality audio. Oh, and the price: $199 USD. This is the best sub $200 wireless lavalier system I've used.
The downside? The included lavalier microphone isn't amazing, but you can clean up the audio in post or replace it with another 3.5mm TRRS lavalier microphone.
Would I opt for this over the RODELink wireless lavalier kit? No, not if I had the budget for the RODELink (see our review here) which is twice the price. But if you're operating on a tight budget, the PRO-XD is definitely worth a look.
Azden PRO-XD Digital Wireless Lavalier Initial Test & Moving Help Sessions
Azden sent over a copy of their PRO-XD wireless lavalier system and in this episode we're doing an initial sample so that you can hear what it sounds like after routine, mild post processing (mild noise reduction, mild compression, loudness normalize to -16LUFS and true peak limit to -1.5dB true peak). We'll have a quick review later this week.
Someone already asked, do you like this or the RODELink better? If money was not a factor, of course I like RODELink more but if money is a factor, and it usually is, the PRO-XD is half the price of RODELink.
The Azden kit has a few unique features and one of the biggest is the size of the transmitter and receiver - they're tiny. They also have in-build lithium-ion batteries which can be charged via micro USB cable and the wireless works as well as RODELink and Sennheiser AVX in terms of keeping a signal in my tests so far. Audio quality is good, though not as good as AVX. It also includes an adapter so you can record to mobile devices which is a nice touch as well.
Seems like a good kit if you're on a tight budget.
And as for the help sessions, we've received feedback that it would be better if we would move those to a different channel. I agree, they're different enough (i.e., an hour in length, Q&A style instead of focused topic) that they should probably be somewhere else. So we’ll post them here.
