QUESTION · SATURDAY Q&A

What are professional hydrophones for underwater recording?

ASKED BY · Unknown · 19 SEP 2026 · ▶ 00:17:11

THE PANEL'S ANSWER

Professional hydrophones include ETS models under $100 with phantom power preamplifier output, and higher-end options like Ambient ASF1 ($417); choice depends on depth rating and whether recording or live streaming.

Summarised by AI from what the panel said. Watch the moment for the full answer.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

From the transcript.

Machine-transcribed, so it may contain errors. Every timestamp opens the episode at that second.

17:10this is designed for pool people to detect underwater pool leaks but there are others here with the supposedly professional hydrophote i haven't tried any one of these for you know under 200 and here's one for 97 this ets makes one uh here it is down here that's a pre-amplifier that's built in it's a phantom powered hydrophone output um so you've got things like that that are

17:37under $100. Then you got the more expensive ones. Here's the ambience for $417. So depending upon what your budget is, how deep you're going to go and whether you need to just record or if you need to get a live image out. Getting a live image out is more difficult because then the wires that go in and out of the housing have to be waterproofed and sealed up really good. And, you know, it

17:59depends on, that's an obvious form of leakage. So you want to test everything, make sure it's leak proof before you stick your camera in there that is very very good advice i'm sure some people that were just getting into this the first time have probably been bitten by that and bought uh bought cheap uh enclosures that did not work properly uh just mentioned a couple of things

18:21in the chat here jason robertshaw is recommending you check out cview.com it looks like they have a bunch of products they have something called the explorer adventure kit and also uh there was Someone else, Mickey McChore in the chat saying, low budget, a camera in an acrylic fish tank, cinema, Alexa 35 and gates underwater housing, broadcast barless or deep vision camera systems

18:47and sound ambient ASF1 hydrophones. And there's a bunch of links in there. So Paul, if you are in the live chat, I would recommend grabbing some of those links and checking out those resources that Mickey pointed you to. also Ike Potter in Hanover Germany suggested not a cam.com has some stuff to look at as well I just a reminder if you want to ask questions on this show if you are tuning in live or just

19:14coming in the door now we call you the producers so you are the ones that dictate the direction of the show and you can use our Q&A system it's called Makana if you don't know how to do that you got to be part of our community and you need to sign up for that so I'm going to tell you how to do that. Just go to officehours.global slash join. That's officehours.global slash join. Just

19:35put in your name and email address. We'll send you the link to Makana. We'll send you the link to Discord and all the other community links that you'll want to be a part of. I'd recommend bookmarking them, putting them somewhere safe. You can vote on those questions up and down. It's kind of like Reddit. And that basically tells us what questions are most important to answer first

19:54on the show for the panelists. And of course, you can also chat with us live, which many of you are doing right now. It's always great seeing all the different people come into the chat and post links and resources and comment. And we get all these different perspectives. It's amazing. So you're missing half the fun if you're not doing that. All right, Courtney, what's up next?

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