Gadgetory

when I heard that Sennheiser was building an underwater microphone for the GoPro Hero 4 I nearly lost my shirt are you freaking serious you mean all the recordings of me screaming like a whiny hairless infant can continue after I hit the water what does high-quality submarine audio even sound like dreams of dialogues with dolphins danced in my dome all around we finally got one but at $200 does it offer enough under the sea adventure to whet your appetite let's dive in HP's new omen ex lineup comes equipped with Intel seventh generation Core i7 processor check it out at the link in the video description excited about owning a piece of history I ripped open this technological breakthrough Vox liberating the high quality foam that encapsulated the device and I'd be lying if I said my audiophile parts weren't tingling a little bit the most obvious physical characteristic of the mk2 Elements is the dead cat style windscreen so clearly then this thing isn't just made for underwater use and if you're just dying to touch it at this point you're not the only one it ended up though being a little less fuzzy and a little more prickly than I expected turns out that's because much like me it's meant to be rugged resistant to dust mud and snow when used above the water's surface the microphone mounts to a shell that will soon become the back half of your GoPros waterproof housing snap it on to the hinge of the stock front piece then this little cable managed wire and this tiny PCB are responsible for connecting the mic to your hero force mini-b USB port they can safely be removed later by the way using this tab you then tuck the whole thing discreetly into the backplate and bring the two halves of the housing together to form a holy Union of hermetically sealed happiness I have to say I was a little surprised to see an exposed PCB but if you look really closely you can actually see that the housing is ever so slightly thinner where it rests which should give you then some idea of how tight the space constraints were for this product the whole package is very light at just 45 grams and setup is easy you don't have to change any settings or turn the mic on separately it just works but how well does it work well we could have done all of our testing in the local pool but that costs 375 for admission and since it wasn't going to be me doing the test anyway we decided to send the new guy to run some tests in this temperate waters of the Canadian Pacific I mean what better underwater aural experience to capture than the screams of a panicked lmg writer being subjected to temperatures low enough to store your leftovers we started by running some highly conventional tests using both the hero force internal mic and the Sennheiser elements microphone including the bel air test oh this is the story and the extreme close-up but then we got a little confused the hero force basic standard waterproof housing obstructs the internal mic resulting in muffled distant sound especially when recording speech so then the elements kicks ass out of the water especially considering it's at the end of a stick five feet away oh it was already a bad idea but that's not what we were antibiotics and when it comes to the difference under the water well I'll let you guys be the judge of that finally at that point then that we fired up the reviewers guide and realized that the elements isn't really meant to be some epic James Cameron level underwater camera in fact it's only rated for pressures of one bar for up to 30 min what does that mean one bar that's just sea level here so practically speaking then it means you can probably take this thing snorkeling for about a half an hour which is okay I guess but I really wish that it was rated to the same depth as the waterproof housing that it's replacing I mean am I even going to be able to take this thing next time I want to go cliff diving though at this point you guys are probably thinking come on cheer up Linus focus on the other points memba the windshield yeah I member and you know what it actually does do a really good job above ground we took our hero 4 on a little bike ride comparing the sound quality between the GoPros standard closed-back housing the open backed housing and the elements Mike and with the closed back housing the internal mic basically only picked up noise from the bikes front tire almost nothing being said by the rider the open back housing started off doing a pretty reasonable job at capturing voice but soon encountered its arch-nemesis wind once the bike started moving and coming back to the elements both of these were complete non issues yourself on a psyche and your ratifies things that it's really like that the windshield completely cut out wind noise during our bike test and it even worked when wet not only that but it doesn't capture a lot of the creaks squeaks and other handling noises that the internal mic does because it's mounted using a flexible shockproof standoff so bottom line then right now this is the only works with GoPro certified bike can't believe it took this long you can use it with mostly the same mentality that you would your GoPro and it sounds great compared to the onboard mic so while it isn't the magical product we wanted it to be if you've got two hundred dollars to blow on better GoPro audio until the Chinese me two brands clone it and even probably long afterward this looks like your best choice whether you wear spiky hair and run around describing things as over 9,000 or you hide your anime love under the blankets crunchyroll has the fix that you need it's the site created by anime fans for anime fans with the most current episodes of new shows straight from Japan like Dragon Ball super and twin star exorcists and all kinds of other great anime all the content on the site is professionally subtitled and our link gives you a whole month a free anime completely ads free then if you enjoy the many benefits of premium like 1080p streaming getting new episodes of shows straight from Japan within an hour of their premiere and being able to stream to a wide variety of devices including your phone then you can continue your premium membership to crunchyroll for only 695 a month so head to crunchyroll.com / - and sign up today get subscribe hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join you