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My phone isn't just for phone calls, text messages and endlessly browsing through social media, as much as I enjoy that.
It's also how I shoot all my video content, whether I'm recording my friends playing a round of golf for YouTube or covering an event with interviews for CNET.
My video quality is always pretty good -- currently, I use the iPhone 15 Pro Max -- but the audio is always lacking.
The built-in microphones on smartphones aren't made for recording dialogue from a distance. If you're a foot away from the phone, in a quiet environment, you can get decent audio quality, but anything further and you're definitely not getting clean audio without some help.
The Rode Wireless Go II is a compact wireless microphone system (one transmitter and one receiver) that allows you to record professional, high-quality audio for recordings you shoot on your phone. If you've ever watched man-on-the-street interviews on TikTok and Instagram or livestreams on Twitch and Kick, you've definitely seen the wireless Rode microphones.
They're these small black boxes (transmitters) that you can clip onto your shirt or hat and then use to transmit audio to your phone, which also has a small black box (receiver) plugged into it.
The furry windshield helps for recording cleaner audio on the Rode Wireless when you're outdoors in windy conditions.
Nelson Aguilar/CNETIt's super easy to set up too. Right out of the box, you just need to turn on all of the black boxes, and they'll automatically pair with each other. You can then place the transmitters onto whoever you're recording audio from, and plug the transmitter into your phone via a USB-C to whatever your phone takes (USB-C, Lightning, 3.5mm, etc.). The entire process takes less than a minute.
Once you're connected, you can record a video on your phone and the high-quality audio from the Rode Wireless Go II will automatically sync.
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You can record in your native camera app or directly from Instagram, TikTok or any other third-party app with a built-in camera feature. You can have up to two transmitters, so you can have audio coming from two different places at once, which is great if there are multiple people talking.
On the screen of the receiver, there's an LED display that shows you input levels, battery life (7 hours on full charge) and signal strength (you can be as far as up to 656 feet).
You must keep the receiver plugged into your phone the entire time.
Nelson Aguilar/CNETThere's more to the Rode Wireless Go II that you can unlock through the Rode Central app. If you want separate tracks for each transmitter (if you're using more than one), you can change over to split mode (merge mode is on by default, which records all audio into a single track). You can also manage the gain of the transmitter, in case the audio is too loud or too quiet. There are settings to manually record audio, change the backlight on the devices and enable timecode (for post-production syncing).
Simply put, if you want better audio for the videos you shoot on your phone or even your DSLR, you need a wireless microphone system like the Rode Wireless Go II.
If you're looking for something a little cheaper and more simple, there's also the $149 Rode Wireless ME, which also comes with a single transmitter and receiver, but has fewer features than the Go II.
You can also get the handheld adapter for the Wireless ME to make your interviews look more professional.
Rode