Rode Reporter XLR Omnidirectional Dynamic Interview Handheld Microphone (Black)

Built quality good but expensive microphone😢😢😢😢😢

This microphone is a dynamic and so needs a strong preamp to drive it properly. Fethead are useful for this.It’s not a studio microphone at all and has a fairly ‘middly’ Kind of sound. It focuses on the voice which is what it was designed for. The long handle is great for capturing interviews and also, with it being an omni, it really is unfussy about where you point it!Also, because it’s an omni, you don’t have as much sensitivity to plosives and there is no proximity effect. It is also really good in the wind, where it almost seems deaf to the effects.Well suited for spoken voice outdoors.

Pros: Blocks out wind, low handling noise.Cons: Picks up lots of ambient noise, very average sound quality.I tested this mic at a busy event and I was shocked when I heard the playbacks. It gave me a number of unusable recordings.Over the years I have used numerous mic set ups from handheld cardoids, to shotguns and lav mics. The rode reporter picked up so much ambient noise you couldn't hear the person speaking well enough (even though the mic was at the recommended distance away).For me this microphone doesn't cut it. It simply picks up far too much ambient sound.The actual quality of the body and grip is fine, but the sound quality has a lot of room for improvement. For me, it does not dial in that well to the person's voice.It was particularly bad on picking up female voices and the main issue overall seems to be that it picks up way too much background noise.I'd take an SM58 or a shotgun mic instead all day long.I really wanted to like this mic but it was hugely disappointing.

I'm very impressed with this microphone.This was my first purchase of both a professional standard microphone and a microphone for use in non-studio environments. I wasn't sure as to wheter it would be fit for purpose having seen numerous testing videos, I used it in a convention environment and most testing videos showed it outside on a roof top or somewhere similar, where there was substantial background noise, but quite a distance away.It far out-performed my expectations, not only were my vocals clear but it cut out a lot of the background noise too, the only thing I had to do it post was to split the audio and send it down both channels, this was only because I was using a XLR to 3.5mm jack as my camera only takes 3.5mm audio. XLR records in mono whereas 3.5mm is stereo. But beyond that there was little-to-no post-production required on the audio output by this microphone.I may only use this a few times a year at different expos/conventions I got to, however I'm superbly impressed by its quality and thus would say it is well worth the price.

The microphone works well but it is not the high end sound if you were looking for that. I have used it several times in the middle of a scrum of reporters and it worked well in directional way and picked up the speech well enough, and as back up mic it is useful. I found it had (in quiet spaces) a noisy sound and is very large compared to other options, but in noisy places it works well. I used it wireless with a Sennheiser wireless transmitter on it and it worked fine.

On initial testing, I was a bit Dubois about this, however it works great in the feild. I use it with the senhiser xsd plug on wirless transmitter and although it dose require the gain to be turned up quite high compared with other mics it dose deliver good sound. Also being ommi, you get a bit of 'ambiance' aswell, which is good when you're foing outside Broadcasts