Razer wants mobile streamers to sound as good as they look with a new wireless lapel mic that’s a lot less intrusive than wearing a big set of headphones with a mic jutting into your face. The company released the Razer Seiren BT today, retailing for $100.
The mic’s 140 mAh battery isn’t terribly capacious, but it’s enough to keep the Seiren BT small and compact and working for about six hours on a charge, or closer to four hours with AI-powered noise suppression activated to improve sound quality when streaming from noisy environments. The amount of noise suppression can be adjusted through Razer’s mobile apps, as can the latency, which can be reduced to less than 20 milliseconds when that’s a priority over sound quality and compression levels. The Seiren BT also includes optional socks to further reduce wind noise (or your inability to avoid popping your Ps when you speak) as well as a wired headphone jack for monitoring the sound being captured and making adjustments before a stream begins.
The long-hyped arrival of 5G means that mobile devices can now easily stream high-resolution content from almost anywhere in the country. Most streamers who let the world into their home offices know that a good microphone is just as important an upgrade as a camera with a nice lens (not a webcam) when it comes to making a livestream look and sound as professional as possible. You’ll often see them speaking into hefty desktop mics, or, if they’re streaming themselves playing games, a microphone on a short arm attached to a pair of large over-ear headphones. What you won’t see them relying on are the tiny microphones inside a pair of earbuds or the mics that come built into a smartphone or other mobile device.
A desktop mic isn’t an option when you’re out and about live-streaming and wearing a big pair of gaming headphones anywhere but sitting in a gaming chair in front of a screen feels out of place. If you’d rather not juggle a handheld mic like an evening news reporter, the new Seiren BT wirelessly connects to your streaming device via Bluetooth. It easily clips onto clothing for hands-free use.