Sennheiser G3 VS SONY UWP: The battle for Quality Audio

I can not stress enough the importance of having quality audio for your DSLR Videos. It has been a proven fact that viewers are more willing to give you a pass on bad video quality of the audio is great opposed to solid video with poor audio.

As many of you know I have been using the SONY UWP Wireless Lavaliers for almost five years now and they have served me very well. Recently we decided to test out the Sennheiser G3’s which are what many consider to be the industry standard. With that being said I did a full review of the G3’s along with a comparison to the older UWP’s. One thing that has to be mentioned is SONY has a newer version of the UWP’s that I would consider to be a much closer competitor to the G3’s.

For the review I wore both microphones at the same time as well as made sure we set all the levels to the same places in the camera and on our recording devices. As you will be able to hear in the video, it’s almost impossible to tell which microphone is better if any. They both do a fantastic job. If I had to make an educated guess I would say the new SONY UWP’s which added a lot of the same features that the G3 already had would come very close in quality and function.

Some of the features that I found useful in the G3’s are the easy sync function which enables you to find the best channel for the location you are in and than sync it to the transmitter. I like how there is no battery tray just a flip open door opposed to a slide out battery tray that in time could come loose.

The G3’s have a better preamp built into them which allows you to bring your levels down in your DSLR which will lead to “cleaner” audio.

The build of the windscreen and how it stays on the microphone may not sound like a big deal but it is. On the SONY’s they have a foam windscreen that just slides over the microphone and does not attach anywhere. I have lost countless windscreens over the years and resorted to super gluing the foam to the mic.

The clip that allows you to attach the microphone to your shirt is better built and attached on the G3’s as well. It’s not going to fall off or get lost when someone pulls the mic off their shirt. Where with the SONY the plastic clip keeps falling off and is extremely easy to misplace.

We tested out the range that you will get with the microphones and the SONY’s allowed you to be farther away. But with that being said, they may have let me be further away but they did not send back a clear usable signal. Either way I was amazed that I walked over two city blocks away form the receiver and it was still getting audio.

Like I said above, I have been using the SONY packs for almost five years now and they have served me well. They would continue to serve me well if I did not replace them with the Sennheiser G3’s. In the end the truth of the matter is they both capture audio that is pretty much going to be indistinguishable.

I will be keeping my SONY’s on hand as a backup to the two new sets of G3’s I just purchased.