Let's Unbox: Ulanzi A200 Wireless Lavalier Mini Mic

There are more than a few capture devices out there, competing to be your go-to device for pulling audio for your livestream, walk-and-talk, interviews, and more. Ulanzi has an iteration on their previous mini microphone. This is...well, it's another Mini Mic, but now called the A200 to keep them straight from one another. Today we'll unbox them, give you a good bit of audio capture to hear, and talk through the features. Let's get started.

There isn't a great deal in the box once unpacked. Two replacement wind screens, a USB A to C cable, and the charging case are frankly all you need. Opening the charging case you'll find a white transmitter, a USB-C receiver in black, and a black transmitter.

These transmitters are are TINY. At just 6 ounces, the appearance of the quarter in this video is no coincidence – they weigh even less than that. This means you won't have it pulling down on your shirt, you can clip it on a hat, or a cable, or anything in between without it causing you any issues.

Setup on the Ulanzi A200 Mini Mic doesn't get any easier. I take out the receiver and plug it into the bottom of my phone and it immediately springs to life. You can see that the lights are blinking as it looks for the transmitters. Pulling out the black transmitter, you can see that in a matter of seconds, and without pressing a single button, it automatically connects up and is ready for use. This is indicated by the solid green light you can see on the bottom of the receiver. From there I could hit record on this basic audio recording app and my phone, and it immediately begins capturing audio.

Bringing up the second one is as easy as bringing up the first one – pull the white transmitter out, and in just a second you've got a green light in that second position. You've now got two transmitters going, split into two audio channels. This is important as the audio profile where the first person is may be wildly different than the second one as they could be closer to a louder audio source. By having them separated you can adjust them individually in post production.

This brings me to one point I need to make – there is no application for this device. Ulanzi Connect is the software you'd normally use with Ulanzi's gear, but it doesn't interface with this. That means you won't be adjusting the audio, or tuning the baked-in gain and noise cancellation. The room I'm in has an air conditioner that likes to run when i record, and if you can't hear that in the video above it means that noise cancellation is working correctly.

If you're so inclined, you can hook this up to your PC via the included USB-A to USB-C cable, plugging the C end into the side of this receiver. Obviously this also works with Android and iOS, but I also wanted to test it with my DJI Osmo Pocket 3. It springs to life just as quickly as it does on my phone, with the audio tally up top jumping as I talk within seconds. This gives me a solid improvement over the internal microphone, and it's tiny and easy to carry, just like this little camera.

Let's round this out and look at the individual specs on the microphone. As I mentioned earlier, the quarter I've been sliding around is no coincidence – the transmitters weigh less than grams - roughly the weight of a quarter. The Omnidirectional microphone captures at 48kHz / 24bit sampling rate, with a signal to noise ratio of 75dB. This means you get a very clean sound as the signal is significantly stronger than the background noise. This value puts these solidly in the "Excellent" category. It also has a frequency response between 20Hz and 20kHz, meaning a very wide range of audio capture that's actually lower and higher than human speech. These also have a THD+N of 0.05%. Any total harmonic distortion (that’s what THD stands for) less than 1% is considered excellent, meaning that, once filtered, any exterior noise should be imperceptible to the human ear. Amazingly, these have a range of 100 meters, or 328 feet for line of sight, or roughly half that if there are any obstacles in the way. For power, they use the included case to charge to full in roughly 1.5 hours, giving you around 6 to 7 hours of continuous use, with the case holding up to 30 hours more of case power.

The best part about this Mini Mic is what you see in the video – it simply could not be easier to use. It's as small as a pair of ear buds. The price is also impossible to beat. At just $49.99 MSRP it's a steal, but at the time of recording, it's on sale for $39.99! I leave it to you to determine the audio quality with the video above, but it sounds pretty great to my ears for that price.

Can you think of a use case for such a portable and easy capture device? Let me know in the comments what you think of the audio coming from the A200 Mini Mics from Ulanzi and how you'd use it. Thanks for watching!

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