Microphone for Zaurus 5500

[dtarrant]

I just bought a high quality miniature electret microphone on ebay from a supplier called microphonics who has a number of these listed.

It seems to work fine on my Zaurus 5500.

Price is competitive.

Tip:  ebay has a feature that enables searching by seller.

[zenyatta]

Interesting, what sound quality / levels of noise do you achieve with that? I always thought a good microphone wasn't really worth it since the Z's A/D converter is not exactly a 112dB job. It would be brilliant if you could post a recording somewhere.

z.

[dtarrant]

That's a fair point about dynamic range. The Z5500 has a 16 bit A/D converter, which would only give 48 db dynamic range compared to 72db that you might get from 24 bit technology.

But hey, the microphone only cost about £10 and sounds great for speech.

I'll try to attach an audio clip to this post.

[zenyatta]

It does sound better than I expected. I use my headphones for the occasional recording (I simply take the ear bud and talk into it). They work OK for voice but I was at a concert recently - trying to record a particular piano riff - and while nearby noises (coughing & talking) were picked up very well, the actual music was barely recorded at all. The recording was completely different from what I heard with my ears (the music sounded loud & clear to my bare ears). I was quite surprised. Specialised tools are hard to beat, I guess.

[jubjub]

What is the Ebay seller ID for microphonics? I can't find them (on ebay.co.uk). Thx.

[dtarrant]

The ebay seller ID is microphonics.

[nilch]

I recently bought the microphonic black microphone for my C1000
from ebay.

My take on it ....

Its not the best quality microphone (you can't expect that much in such a small package).  The one positive thing is it goes well with the black exterior of the zaurus and looks like a small antenna on a "Zaurus phone"  

I wanted to record my baby's sounds and I needed to keep my zaurus away from her - since if she sees it in front of her face - she starts screaming for it - and I didn't really want to record screaming sounds    , I just wanted her normal voice sounds as she cooed and spoke strange gibberish in the mornings.

But keeping the zaurus a few feet away (4 feet) doesn't record very well.
Instead if its near your face (like < 2ft), then the sound is pretty reasonable (mono), provided you adjust the gain to high on the sound recorder settings.

Its an OK quality microphone - I had thought about buying the Sony DSP Stereo Micmic but that would have been a waste of money since the Zaurus only record in mono.

Anybody esle had any better experiences with a mini microphone for the zaurus ?