Sennheiser Profile Wireless Mic review

From the moment you unzip the pouch, the Profile Wireless stands out as completely unique in its execution. A charging bar holds everything you need in a form factor that doubles up as a handheld microphone! Various sides of the charging bar give you access to all the components that make up a complete audio recording suite. Two clip-on transmitters, a 2.4GHz receiver with an OLED screen, USB-C and Lightning connectors, cold-shoe adaptor mount and magnets, all reside within!

If that’s not all, Sennheiser also provides windscreens for both the transmitters as well as a foam variant for the handheld contraption and even a 3.5mm TRS cable if you need to attach a professional lavalier microphone. This way, you can just use the transmitter without the built-in microphones and send a higher quality clip directly to your computer, phone or DSLR. It all fits neatly into a travel-friendly pouch and should be everything you need to capture audio bytes on the move. The on-screen controls are a bit fiddly and take some getting used to, but they’re a nice inclusion nonetheless and negates the need for another partnering app on your smartphone. Gain, output level, back-up mode, low-cut filter, recording mode (stereo, mono, safety) and more functions can be directly accessed from the OLED display. Equipped with a gyroscope, it also rotates itself depending on its orientation so it’s always facing the right way up for easy readability.

 

 

 

 

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With a claimed range of over 800 feet that honestly is a bit ambitious, with a clear line of sight, we did manage about 520 ft in a straight line before experiencing dropouts and breakage as we took a turn around a brick wall. The back-up mode automatically starts recording when you are beyond the range of the receiver or if and when obstructed. Gain levels had to be bumped up a bit to get the necessary levels of impact when recording for social media but the clarity was never in question with a high level of vocal intelligibility with sibilance well in control. You do have the option of using a low-cut filter in case you find yourself in inherently rumbly surroundings like a train station, lighthouse with high winds or strapped to a supercharger. Things happen, you know. To make matters more precarious, the Profile Wireless tops out at 24 bit recording instead of the 32-bit you may be expecting at this price point. It does limit the dynamic range a bit when you’re outdoors but if your usage is primarily indoors and in controlled acoustic conditions, it shouldn’t matter.

For an even more professional sounding audio presentation but with the convenience of wireless and the range, each transmitter (microphone) also has a lavalier connector. Coupled with 16GB of on-device storage, technically you could record up to 30 hours of audio on each microphone, but the battery life is about 7 hours a piece before you need to pop it back in the charging bar for a juice-up. The 2000mAh charging bar doesn’t hold much juice and the number of times you can use it to charge the two transmitters will depend on a number of factors, based on how you’ve aligned the different settings. More crucially though, the standby times of the charging bar itself is pretty low and during our test cycle, we had to charge it every few days even without using the microphones. It would be advisable to check the charge levels before nonchalantly dropping the Profile Wireless pouch in your backpack before a shoot day.

Compared to a el-cheapo Amazon-available Boya Bluetooth wireless mic that sells for 1/10th the price, the Sennheiser definitely gives you tons more flexibility, range, control and safety riders for your critical assignments. But in terms of the actual recorded audio quality, there isn’t a day/night difference. The Sennheiser is much better at capturing some of the ambience and spatial cues of the venue and is much better suited to recording ASMR videos, whereas the BT-enabled Boya just focuses on getting the voice right, minus the paraphernalia. Overall, the sound is definitely not ten times better as the price would suggest. But that would also be missing the point of the breadth of engineering and innovation here. If your content style is casual, close-to-camera and one-take-wonders, you’d probably be better off with a BT mic. But if you regularly edit your content on a desktop with time to manipulate the audio levels and tinker around with gain, filters and noise printing, then the Sennheiser is definitely the ideal choice.

Not an impulse purchase, the Sennheiser Profile Wireless is a great bag of tricks. From being used as a reporting-style handheld microphone to a table-top podcasting solution, it is much more than its typical 3-piece set-up might suggest. It implores you to find interesting ways to shoot your content and the fact that everything you need resides in one place is a masterstroke in design. Especially if you’re prone to losing items on the go.