Philip Colmer
04-14-2005, 05:00 PM
<img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/colmer-sonyuwp-0.jpg" /><br /><br /><b>Product Category:</b> Wireless microphone<br /><b>Manufacturer:</b> <a href="http://www.sonybiz.net/profaudio">Sony</a><br /><b>Where to Buy:</b> <a href="http://www.totalaudio.co.uk/">Total Audio</a><br /><b>Price:</b> UWP-C1 - £595; ECM-77BC - £245<br /><b>System Requirements:</b> XLR or 3.5mm audio input<br /><b>Specifications:</b> Crystal-controlled PLL synthesizer, transmitter is 63mm wide x 100mm tall x 27mm deep and weighs approx 140g including batteries, receiver is 63mm x 100mm x 20mm and weighs approx 180g including batteries.<br /><br /><b>Pros:</b><li>Easy to set up;<br /><li>Locking sockets prevent cables coming loose;<br /><li>Clear audio with signal strength indicator.<b>Cons:</b><ul><li>Supplied microphone is a bit big.</ul><b>Summary:</b><br />Wireless microphones are great for picking up sound where you need it, without the constraints of cables. The Sony UWP package is a reasonably priced transmitter, receiver and lavelier microphone with some good design decisions.<br /><br />Read on for the full review!<!><br /><PAGEBREAK><br /><span><b>Audio is Important</b></span><br />When reading a review of a camcorder, you will often see criticism of the sound quality. The fundamental problems that camcorder designers have are that the microphone has to be part of the camcorder body and they have to get the microphone to record appropriate sounds and not, for example, tape motor noise.<br /><br />Modern camcorders have made big improvements in the latter department over their earlier brethren but, at the end of the day, the microphone is built-in and if you are videoing something that is 20 feet away, the sound from that something is going to have to "work harder" to reach the microphone than the sound of someone chatting next to you.<br /><br />This review is going to look at a popular option for solving that issue - using a wireless microphone. Specifically, I'm going to be looking at the Sony UWP wireless microphone package.<br /><br /><span><b>Pros and Cons of Wireless</b></span><br />Wireless microphone technology has improved significantly over the years. In most TV discussion/news programmes, you will see correspondents wearing small microphones clipped to their clothing. These connect to body-pack transmitters, normally located around the belt area at the back. Use of wireless technology here has the benefit of being able to "wire up" a guest before they walk onto the set, and not being dependent on table-top microphones that, like the camcorder microphone, are going to pick up other sounds.<br /><br />Modern wireless packs use frequencies that are, by and large, not going to clash with other items. However, the wireless spectrum is a very crowded one and you may, inevitably, end up needing to change the setting in order to find a free frequency. Clearly, a product that supports more frequencies is going to be more versatile than one that only has a few to choose from.<br /><br />Another enhancement for wireless technology is the auto-tuning and locking that the transmitter and receiver perform, providing you with stable audio without the need to tune the units in.<br /><br />One of the downsides, however, is distance. As you'll see later on this review, the units will only cover a limited line-of-sight range.<br /><br /><span><b>Sony's UWP Range</b></span><br />Sony sells the package in a variety of configurations, each with a transmitter and a receiver, but the two ends taking different forms - body-pack transmitter or hand-held microphone at one end, and a portable receiver, a receiver module or a half-rack size receiver unit at the other end. I'm going to be looking at the body-pack transmitter and portable receiver in more detail but the basic functionality is the same regardless of the unit packaging.<br /><br />All of the combinations operate in the same way - using a choice of UHF carrier frequencies to allow the operator to find a frequency that isn't in use, along with a tuner module that uses a technology called space diversity to pick the strongest signal from the two antennae connected to the tuner. The UWP range offers support for enough frequencies that you can have sixteen packs running at the same time without interference with each other.<br /><br />The default omni-directional microphone that you get with the body-pack transmitter is a fairly chunky item that does the job but is fairly indiscrete. Figure 1 shows the microphone naked on the right, and with the wind cover and tie clip on the left. Without the cover, the microphone is 1cm in diameter and about 2.5cm long.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/colmer-sonyuwp-originalmic.jpg" /> <br /><i>Figure 1: Original microphone, with and without cover and clip.</i><br /><br />I originally started looking at wireless microphones with a view to using them to improve the audio quality of weddings - the UWP pack was going to do this for me, but the default microphone was going to stick out like a sore thumb.<br /><br />Thankfully, the transmitter has a 3.5mm socket so you can connect alternative microphones. Sony does a professional-level microphone that is much more discrete, as Figure 2 shows. The ECM77 microphone is only 0.5cm diameter, 1.3cm long.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/colmer-sonyuwp-twomicsnocovers.jpg" /> <br /><i>Figure 2: Beauty and the Beast?</i><br /><br />A further comparison can be found in Figure 3 where you can see the microphones with their clips and windshields.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/colmer-sonyuwp-twomics.jpg" /> <br /><i>Figure 3: The two microphones fully clothed.</i><br /><PAGEBREAK><br /><span><b>Send and Receive</b></span><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/colmer-sonyuwp-1.jpg" /> <br /><i>Figure 4: The body-pack transmitter.</i><br /><br />The transmitter comes with a belt-clip to allow the pack to be easily supported on clothing (as you can see in Figure 5). The pack has a ready-fitted wire antenna and, as already mentioned, a 3.5mm socket for the microphone. The socket includes an outer screw thread so that the microphone jack is held in place and doesn't get accidentally pulled out. This is particularly useful when you consider that the microphone cable could get tugged by clothing as the person moves around, so the ability to lock the microphone onto the pack is good design.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/colmer-sonyuwp-6.jpg" /> <br /><i>Figure 5: The transmitter clipped onto a belt.</i><br /><br />The body of the receiver is very similar to that of the transmitter. The main difference is that it has two antenna and two sockets on the top of the pack. One is a 3.5mm locking socket for providing the microphone input to the camera or other audio system. The other is a non-locking socket for monitoring the sound. This is a very useful feature since whatever the pack is connected to may not have its own monitoring or headphone socket.<br /><br />The product comes with a 3.5mm locking plug to XLR cable for feeding the audio into an unbalanced XLR socket. For my needs, I purchased an additional 3.5mm to 3.5mm cable, with a locking plug at one end as my camcorder only has a 3.5mm microphone socket.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/colmer-sonyuwp-4.jpg" /> <br /><i>Figure 6: Shoe mount adapter.</i><br /><br />As with the transmitter, the receiver has a belt clip fitted to the back. The system also comes with a shoe mount adapter that clips underneath the belt clip, as shown in Figure 6. This allows the receiver to be fitted securely to any conventional shoe mounting point. This can be seen in Figure 7, where I've attached the pack to the top of my camcorder.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/colmer-sonyuwp-2.jpg" /> <br /><i>Figure 7: Receiver mounted on a camcorder.</i><br /><br />As you can see from the photo, it is possible to adjust the antenna both in angle and direction.<br /><br />An alternative to mounting the pack into a shoe is to use the microphone stand adapter that is supplied with the pack. This is likely to be useful if you are using the receiver in a PA configuration.<br /><PAGEBREAK><br /><span><b>In Use</b></span><br />Both the transmitter and the receiver use two AA batteries for power, as shown in Figure 8. The cover is held securely in place and you must operate a slider on the side of the casing in order to open the cover. Using standard batteries like these is a great benefit when you could find yourself running low on battery power and unable to recharge.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/colmer-sonyuwp-5.jpg" /> <br /><i>Figure 8: Batteries in the pack.</i><br /><br />To use the pack, you turn the receiver on first. This allows you to ensure that you are using a free frequency - the receiver has a green RF light that turns on when it detects a signal. The unit is protected against accidental adjustment by needing you to hold the set button down for a few seconds before the pack goes into setup mode. The packs are designed to operate in a wide variety of countries, each of which has its own available frequency bands. It is therefore important to read the manual that comes with the pack in order to understand which frequencies you are allowed to use. It might have been better if the product allowed you to specify the country in some way and then lock down the frequencies available for your use.<br /><br />Having found a free frequency, you can set the transmitter to suit. To do this differs from the receiver and is an additional safeguard against accidental alteration. For the transmitter, you have to press the Set button while turning the transmitter on. You can then adjust the frequency and the RF output level. The latter switches between low (5mW) and high (30mW). The low level is used if you have multiple UWP packs being used and the high level is used to provide longer distance coverage. In open air tests that I ran, the high level did extend the straight-line distance but not by as much as the 6-fold increase in power would suggest. There isn't anything in the manual to suggest how changing the power level impacts the battery life.<br /><br />Speaking of battery life, a really neat feature is an accumulated battery use time indicator. Both the transmitter and receiver keep track in hours and minutes of how long they've been turned on. This timer is manually reset. The manual says that the batteries should last about six hours.<br /><br />In the tests run, the sound from the microphone was clearly and cleanly transmitted to the receiver. The receiver's display shows how strong the RF signal is, so you know if you are in danger of losing the sound. The use of a squelch tone (inaudible to the end-user) means that if the signal gets too weak, the receiver cuts off the transmission, thus avoiding noise creeping into the audio.<br /><br /><span><b>Conclusions</b></span><br />The product is well designed. The packs are of plastic construction but very rigid and they have a solid feel to them. The product has definitely been designed with a view to avoiding problems caused by cables coming loose or settings getting changed.<br /><br />I couldn't discern a quality difference between the microphone supplied with the pack and the ECM-77 microphone that I purchased - they both picked up the audio really well. At the end of the day, it is going to come down to aesthetics and whether or not your budget can stretch to the additional microphone.<br /><br />The price for the main product is, I think, very reasonable. Wireless microphone systems have come down a lot over the last couple of years. You can get more expensive systems but you don't really get a lot more functionality. The additional microphone is quite expensive, particularly when compared to the price of the original pack, but it is a professional quality, small microphone and this is definitely an area where you get what you pay for.<br /><br />Philip Colmer is an I.T. Manager for a global electronic publishing company.<br />In his spare time, he enjoys researching his family history, developing his videography skills and going shopping with his wife.