Sony's ECM-AX10 is a phone mic with four capsules. Will creators bother with spatial audio on phone content?
ASKED BY · Paul Walhus · AUSTIN, TEXAS · 23 OCT 2026 · ▶ 00:36:15
Courtney explained the mic's three modes (ambisonic, binaural, stereo) and noted it depends on use case—useful for environmental sound effects but less so for interviews or music recording.
Fenwick praised companies making experimental products like this, noting that even if imperfect, encouraging experimentation with high-quality capture can lead to innovative sound design possibilities.
Jason noted that spatial audio capture works well on modern iPhones with decent technique and suggested using a side-by-side recorder to allow ambient recording.
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From the transcript.
Machine-transcribed, so it may contain errors. Every timestamp opens the episode at that second.
35:52super simple, I've used that before and it works really nicely. And I need DirectX 9 to make that How's that going to happen? Next question. All right. This is from Paul Valhus in Austin, Texas. Sony's ECM-AX10 is a phone mic with four capsules. Will creators bother with spatial audio on phone content? Jason? What is this? Yes, some will, but I'll remind you, Paul, like spatial audio capture is actually pretty good on a modern iPhone, assuming you're using, you know, decent technique.
36:25I would take a side-by-side recorder for whatever you want front and center and like allow the ambient recording to actually just occur on the mic. It does look cool though. I think Fenwick is showing it off. But yeah, it looks more like a theremin than a super elite kind of a rig of condensers. There will be one theremin reference in each episode.
36:50The first read of this question, I thought it meant for people consuming spatial audio on phones. And then I thought, oh, Paul, you know, you're supposed to, in public, you got to wear headphones. Because I know a lot of people don't know that. But when you're watching video content on your phone, and there's a lot of people around, it's kind to wear headphones.
37:11And I don't know why that got a little Christopher Walken there. But when you're watching content on your phones, it's kind, Courtney. Yeah, no. If you're watching on your own. Now, this has four capsules and it has four, three modes. It has ambisonic, it has binaural, and I don't know how they're doing that without a dummy head, and stereo pickup. And this is about the size of an Aggie marble, you know, that plugs into your iPhone.
37:43Will creators bother to use this to record spatial? It depends. If they're doing, you know, deep in the forest, you know, if you're going to record environmental sounds, you know, sound effects editors used to go out with stereo microphones or ambisonic microphones and record backgrounds for movies for that kind of stuff. Yeah, using it for a recording of an interview or a basketball game or anything, or even
38:11music. You know, it has a stereo mode, but I'd prefer to mic individual instruments and mix it into a nice stereo mix rather than just to capture what's going on in the room to make it sound like it. If you were really there and you were in that room with bad acoustics listening to those two people playing the guitar, this is what it would sound like.
38:31It's like a plasma ball. What a strange design. Now, it looks like a little marble stuck to the end of your phone. See, it's right there. How they get spatial audio without a dummy head for that kind of recording. Well, but spatial audio is going to be different than binaural. Spatial ambisonic is different than binaural, but binaural depends on the shadow of the head matching the head of a person.
39:02And that's how it gets its directionality because it filters frequencies coming from the different mics at different angles and time delay. Unless they've developed an algorithm to do that, you know, algorithmically to the microphones that are in that little ball. I love that Sony and a lot of companies, for that matter, still play. Like they still make these products that don't have a well-established market and maybe aren't going to take off.
39:26but I think that it's so powerful to, and I know it's, oh yeah, we're going to bring it to a phone, whatever. But the phone's a little computer. If it can capture that sound at a high quality and you can make it more portable, then that encourages experimentation. Is it going to be perfect? Is it going to replace the DPA bike seat microphone
39:45when we did NAB in 5.1? No. But could somebody make something really cool with it? Absolutely. Absolutely. Look at the sound design on films, on some of the best films that came out in the 70s. And what, you know, I saw Walter Murch speak once about how he did the sound mixing for Apocalypse Now. And he was like, yeah, like to hear him talk about how they recorded sounds for that, you go, then they did what?
40:10So, yeah, you got to experiment. You got to play. If you want to experiment and play, there's a lot going on here at Office Hours. If you go to officehours.global slash join, it's pretty great because not only can you join in on the live show into the chat and get to know all the people in the community, but also you get into the Discord.
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