bootlegMIC

A better set of ears for your cellphone!

Inspired by all the aweful sounding concert videos on youtube, we designed this microphone to be cheap and easy to use, so hopefully lots of people start using them! Please! Right now we have them available as kits in our store. So take a look at the assembly page, and see if its a good project for you.

The bootlegMIC uses a simple modification to a common electret microphone, to decrease the output level, and decrease the distortion normally associated with cellphone microphones. To learn about the theory of operation, check out the wiki page. We tested every microphone Mouser sells before settling on the one used in the bootlegMIC. It has a low noise floor, low quiescent current, and low distortion. And it sounds good too!

The bootlegMIC is just as useful for concerts as it is for capturing impromptu jam sessions or other loud field recordings. It can even be modified to work with a laptop or mixing board. The gain of the microphone is set by one of the resistors, so if it doesn’t match your phone, it’s a simple matter of swapping out a resistor to get the sound you want. So far we have only tested it with an iPhone and Android. The iPhone worked fine, but the Android App. we were using didn’t recognize the external mic jack. We will continue to research this.