QUESTION · ARCHIVE

Just for some quick recordings for PR and general announcements, I'd like to use this mic on my iPhone Pro Max 17 so the audio is nice and clear. Thoughts?

ASKED BY · Zach Stalsmith · CHAUTAUQUA, NEW YORK · 26 SEP 2026 · ▶ 00:47:16

THE PANEL'S ANSWER
Bill

iPhone audio quality is acceptable for casual content and note-taking but lacks control for professional voiceover work. Smartphone audio contains DSP and Apple Intelligence processing that, while acceptable for many uses, prevents the highest audio quality needed when content will be processed or edited by professional mixers.

Courtney

The Shure MV88 stereo USB-C microphone is better suited for ambient sound and field recording than voiceover announcements. For announcements, use a single-pattern USB microphone positioned 4-6 inches away. Stereo mics introduce unnecessary complexity for speech.

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47:10days and it can be very very good even with the default tools without going to an external mic chain external preamp and the rest of that people are used to listening to iphone quality or smartphone quality audio and doing okay with it now take that same thing and move into the professional realm and almost everybody i know who's truly a high quality audio person will say this is not good

47:37enough. And it isn't good enough if you're going to be taking it into a big screen movie theater and you want control over the sound and you want it to be professionally good. But that's not what a lot of people are doing. So I know a lot of people who do a lot of recording onto their phones and use it and they they're just fine with the results. There's some DSP and some Apple

48:03intelligence and other things in my iPhone that allows me to get a decent quality recording. It's perfect for note-taking. I can even use it occasionally if I need to for some kind of semi-professional use. But would I use that to record my voiceovers? No, I would not. I want the highest level possible because I don't know what the end user, the mixer, the person on the

48:28other end is going to want to do with that. And my goal is to keep it at the quality as high as possible. And phone, the phones today have too many things going on for me to know that, that I can achieve that with a stock phone without doing some other things in the middle. So that's where I am at this point. All right, let's go to Courtney.

48:51Yeah, I haven't used this, so I can't speak to its quality. Uh, you know, it's what it is, is it's a stereo microphone there's one problem if you're just using it for recording voiceover announcements or announcements that are going to be put somewhere a stereo mic will probably get you in more trouble than necessary and this is sure who's you know they make quality microphones

49:12you know a lot of people here on the show are using them a lot of the time this is the mv88 it's a c uh you know usb c plug-in so it it has uh i guess a to d converter inside of it and it It delivers a stereo signal over USB-C to your iPhone, so you plug it directly into the bottom of your phone.

49:32And it has a pop filter. But I think it's designed, this particular microphone is designed more for recording ambient sounds for sound effects, you know, collectors that want to collect sound effects, stereo backgrounds in the field, you know, crickets or car drive-bys, things like that. It's not necessarily, I don't think it's mid-side. I haven't seen what the pattern is, but it is a stereo.

49:57Whether it has two capsules in there, you know, a figure eight and a cardioid, or whether it has just two single cardioids, I'm not sure. I'd have to do a little more investigation. But a stereo mic is probably going to get you into more trouble when necessary. Go for a single pickup microphone that plugs in a USB mic and plug it into your iPhone and use it for announcements.

50:21that's the probably better way to go and stay, you know, four to six inches away from it when you're recording. Yeah. And Bill, you have another comment? Yeah. Everything Courtney said, I will just say, it's also remember always the environment. It's whether or not you're in any kind of a treated space or whether it's noisy or things like that, all mics just record what hit the diaphragm.

50:44So if you're in traffic in your car and the windows are opening and you're trying to record something to put on the air, it's not going to work very well. On the other hand, if you take a modest mic and take it into a vocal booth like I used to own, it sounds surprisingly good. And you can get decent recordings out of that.

51:02So it's a combination of all these things. One of the problems with mics on your phones is that people tend to say, okay, it doesn't sound too noisy in here. So I'm just going to hold the phone a foot away from my voice and say it here in this room. And you go back and if you apply a compression to it and turn it up,

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