Digital Home Thoughts: Sony UWP Wireless Microphone Package

Audio is Important
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.

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.

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.

Pros and Cons of Wireless
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.

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.

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.

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.

Sony's UWP Range
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.

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.

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.


Figure 1: Original microphone, with and without cover and clip.

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.

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.


Figure 2: Beauty and the Beast?

A further comparison can be found in Figure 3 where you can see the microphones with their clips and windshields.


Figure 3: The two microphones fully clothed.