Record Better Audio on Your Phone With the Rode Wireless Go II, on Sale for Labor Day [CNET]

You can use these tiny audio recording devices for your livestreams, daily blogs and interviews that you shoot on your phone or camera.

I use my smartphone for more than just phone calls, text messages and endlessly browsing through social media. It’s also how I shoot all my video content, whether I’m recording my friends playing a round of golf or covering an event with interviews for CNET.

And while my video quality is pretty good — currently I use my iPhone 15 Pro Max — 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 farther and you’re definitely not getting clean audio without some help.

The Rode Wireless Go II, currently $191 ($108 off) for Amazon’s Labor Day sale, is a compact wireless microphone system (one transmitter and one receiver) that allows you to record professional, high-quality audio for any video 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 probably seen the wireless Rode microphones. 

They’re these small black boxes that you can clip onto your shirt or hat and then transmit audio to your phone, which also has a small black box plugged into it.

It’s super easy to set up too — it takes only a few minutes with the Rode Central app. 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. 

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. And 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.

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 more simple, there’s also the $149 Rode Wireless ME, which also comes with a single transmitter and receiver.