Gadgetory

what's up guys welcome back to the channel today I'm going to be taking a look at this TM 2x condenser microphone from tascam now this isn't a sample or a review sample from tascam themselves this was kind of more of an impulse buy on my end I actually bought it off a mass drop a few days ago from sorry a few weeks ago for like 50 something dollars it's usually 60 something dollars so I got a decent deal on it but like I said it was kind of bought on a whim because I don't really have anything like this in my current film equipment arsenal and this is by no means a high-end product right it's 50 bucks you can pretty much pick one up with with relative ease the built-in microphones on almost every single camera DSLR point-and-shoot they just they're quite frankly they're crap so this is just a great simple cheap way to kind of boost your audio quality with whatever camera you might be using does connect to your camera via a shoe accessory mount so make sure that your camera does have one of those before picking one of these up but I'm going to talk about all that good fun stuff in just a bit so why don't we take this out of the box and see what's inside alright so let's take a look at this little microphone right here as you can see it's pretty small it does look really nice too looks very professional you get some tascam branding on the back there at the tm-2 X model number very classy stuff this is the microphone right here or the microphones I should say because there are two of them so you do get stereo sound it does feature an XY cardioid pattern pickup so got to familiar with that cardioid means that it's going to be picking up sound in the direction of the microphone spacing for the most part it's not as directional as a hyper-cardioid or shotgun pattern but it is much more directional than let's say an omnidirectional microphone which obviously picks up sound coming from all directions of the microphone so because of that they do allow you to swivel the microphone up and down 180 degrees and anywhere in between so you can point the microphone directly at your audio source just for a better pick up and the XY pattern thing all that means is that this microphone is picking up sound from this way and this microphone is picking up sound from this way and together you kind of get this cone of pickup area so this is actually a really good solution for something like pollen eyes live stream that we do every week where you have two audio sources coming from each of the hosts sitting side-by-side and having this kind of pickup pattern will really help you pick up both both audio sources and both voices quite evenly with relative ease so it's kind of nice to have I might actually try this out for one of the live streams in the future on the left side of the mic you get a low-cut filter right here this is really great for eliminating low frequencies that are generally unwanted when you're recording so for example the room Rumble or that ambient room noise that you sometimes hear and really bad YouTube videos or even some of mine probably this is really great for eliminating that you just kind of enable it and it'll cut off any low frequencies that are below 130 kilohertz I believe that's correct and this is going to be great because it doesn't interfere with the human voice the human voice actually operates at a much higher frequency than that so you can actually eliminate room Rumble without without alternating someone's voice which is a nice feature to have on the other side you get a low and high sensitivity switch which is really handy for picking up noise in a really loud or quiet environment so if you happen to be at a concert and your audio levels are just peaking left and right you can switch it to low sensitivity and that that will give you a much more even pick up without peaking so much or if you're let's say I can't around a campfire and someone's telling ghost stories really quietly you can switch it to high sensitivity if you really want to be able to hear what they're saying and pick them up a bit better apart from that you'll notice how this microphone is kind of floating it's kind of suspended in midair magically the reason for this is basically noise isolation and vibration isolation so any kind of vibration that might be coming from your camera that might be moving up towards the mic will just stop it'll it'll come to a dead stop at the suspension mechanism here so that you don't pick it up on your microphone and get you know really bad Rumble noise or any kind of vibration things like that really nice to have you also do get some cable clasps here you can see there's two of them behind the microphone and two of them in front for type II cable management of this this cable here I'm going to get to that later let's talk about the K we're really quick you get a 13 inch 8 inch cable plugs right into your DSLR or whatever camera you're using this is great for just plug in power essentially you don't have to have any kind of battery there's no battery that you need to charge or replace in this thing it just simply gets powered by your camera by the batter your camera so you do want to make sure you have extra batteries on hand for your camera because you'll be sipping on it a little bit with the TM 2x but all in all very nice plug-and-play feature on the bottom here you do get a quarter inch thread so you can mount this microphone onto a tripod for example honestly it might look a little funny on a tripod because it's so small but I'm sure that there are use case scenarios where that would make a lot of sense so it's good to have that feature as well but the main the main squeeze here is that this is a shoe accessory mount so you can slide this onto your your hot shoe on your on your camera and then tighten it down with this little screw here the one problem I have with this mechanism is that this is completely plastic the thread is the thread is also plastic but and that's okay but the actual screw and the thread underneath it is completely plastic and I would have liked to see a metal construction especially since this is going to be getting handled all the time taking it off and putting it on to the camera and actually truth be told this is not the original microphone that I got from mass drop this is actually in exchange I had to replace mine because it came completely defected on arrival where this entire piece all the way up to the thread had completely snapped off of the microphone and there was just no way fixing it so I would like to see that in a future revision test can be if you're listening make this metal it make me happy but apart from that I think that pretty much wraps it up for the microphone so let's move on to our first accessory alright so here we have the noise isolation arm and what this essentially does is it puts your your microphone further away from your DSLR and closer to your subject so if your subjects a bit further away and you're having a hard time picking them up you might want to consider using this noise isolation arm you kind of just screw it on like that it has a hot shoe right at the front screws down just like that and then you would screw this part to your DSLR which is also a hot shoe accessory right here also made of plastic tascam again make this metal especially this especially the noise isolation arm right because there's a lot more support and a lot more weight kind of pressing on it and putting tension on it so would like to see metal on that as well but the other benefit of having this long arm besides being able to get closer to your subject is putting the microphone further away from your camera so especially on DSLRs where you have your shutter the shutter your lens opening and closing and making noise or even just the buttons if you're just pressing buttons and changing settings on the fly while you're filming on your DSLR a lot of that mechanical noise can get picked up quite easily by the microphone but having this isolation arm just puts it a little bit further away from the that audio source so that it's not picking up any unwanted mechanical noise which is nice to see and finally oh wait I did want to mention that you should not use this as a handle I think this goes without saying but you know test cam really wanted to make it clear even for the stupid people who can't read they've included a picture to show you how not to use it obviously it's not doesn't have the most structure structural integrity so I would definitely not use this to pick up your camera by any means lastly for this accessory I did want to show you the cable routing magic here using these little cable routing clips these clasps I don't know exactly if they're clips or clasps or whatever but there's also one on the isolation arm right here so you can tie it like that and it just kind of makes your cable a lot more tidy overall looks it looks more professional and it also just keeps it out of the way so it doesn't accidentally get snagged on anything and cause some problems or even damage so nice feature to have there as well and lastly we do have a little included dead cat this is also really handy especially if you're going outdoors and you're filming outside you simply slide this over your microphone like so and it helps eliminate wind noise definitely reduces wind noise quite quite nicely so it looks very nice too it's a nice looking dead cat I never thought I'd say that about a dead cat but it does look pretty professional overall and it is a nice accessory to have so there you go I think on that note we should do some audio testing I think we've seen enough here to kind of know what we're dealing with so I'm going to do a little audio test between the TM 2x my dr-40 from tascam which is my daily recorder that I use for all my YouTube videos which is a $200 PCM recorder so it's probably gonna sound a bit nicer than this thing but just to have you something to compare it to and lastly I'm also going to compare both of those microphones to the shitty built-in mic that's on the DSLR which is what I'm filming with right now so why don't we go ahead and have a listen alright whoa Manby noise out there we're recording right now with all three microphones but I'm going to switch between the three of them in post-production so right now you're hearing the built-in microphone on my Canon 70d we're still in my room same room I'm equidistant from all three microphones more or less within an inch or two so that's not going to make too much of a difference but here's the built-in microphone sound and I'm going to switch it over to the tascam really quick give me a second so I just I just plugged in the eighth inch Jack of the test cam 2 m TX 2 TM 2x hopefully this sounds a bit better I'm coming through a bit clearer now blah blah blah blah blah I'm going to go ahead and switch the low-cut filter on as you can see if that sounds me different I haven't really heard it yet but maybe there's less room Rumble or something like that som some lowered stifled ambient noises in my room I don't have the AC on or anything so it shouldn't be too bad but there you guys have it so there's the TM 2x and then finally we're going to switch over to the to the dr-40 task cam that I use daily for all my YouTube videos and stuff it's what you were hearing earlier when I was actually taking a look at the microphone up close and stuff so this should probably sound the best out of all three but there you go alright and there you guys have the sound test in my opinion I think the TM 2x does a pretty good job of picking up my voice and making it sound relatively natural and clear obviously when comparing it to something like the dr-40 which is a $200 PCM recorder I mean this obviously it's a 50 $60 mic so it's kind of unfair to compare the two but I think it did a pretty good job in its own right for being such a budget a budget microphone and I think where this this kind of thing really shines is in field shooting so if you're going to go off site somewhere and maybe you're just doing some point-and-shoot type material I think it could be a lot more cumbersome to actually have like a wireless pack on your subject you know with a lavalier and stuff just slap this onto your DSLR and just plug it in and start shooting I think this also really helps a lot in post-production too because being able to plug in the 8th inch Jack into your DSLR directly allows you to record both audio and video simultaneously so when you're in post-production you don't have to actually sync the audio and video track separately it's all recorded there on one file so let's definitely provide some expedited usage for people like me but altogether for 50 60 bucks especially if you can get a good deal on this thing on a site like mass drop like I did you really can't go wrong and I really do love how does have a lot of good features that it comes with some good accessories like the noise isolation arm and the dead cat but that is just my opinion let me know what you guys think of this microphone in the comments below if you might be interested in something like this for all of you film aficionados out there and thank you guys for watching the video be sure to like it if you enjoyed it subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and I'll see you guys in the next one