Archives September 2020

Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage. Today we’re going to talk about something that I just bought for the channel: this solid two microphone interview set, lavalier mics, which I’m wearing right now. So I bought this set from Amazon because, uh, my last video sounded a little rough, and it’s because I’m here in the garage, and there’s a lot of echo in here, a lot of reverb, and I had to stand kind of far away from the camera to, you know, do my presentation. So one thing that I noticed while I was cutting that video together was that the audio wasn’t very good. Now, I did what I could in post-processing, and it turned out a little bit better, but still it wasn’t great. So I went ahead and sprung for a set of lavalier microphones, and there’s a two-pack. It’s sold as an interview set, so you know you can have one and whoever you’re interviewing can have one. But I got this because, for one, the price was right; it’s like 20 bucks. And for two, because with two microphones, I can actually have an extension that I can run all the way, basically almost all the way to the other side of the garage. So we’re going to see how this works out so far, and the little bit of work that I’ve done with them, they seem to do pretty well. But we’re going to test them. I’m going to do some garage tests in here with both microphones to see how they work, and I’m also going to take them on the road to see how they sound while we’re in the Bullnose. So without further ado, let’s get to it.

So we’ll do this next part in a little bit of an unboxing style. It comes in this very simple little, uh, plastic case just like this, not much to it. Um, but it’s like a Ziploc baggie, so that’s kind of nice. It comes with this very nice, um, sorry, a very nice solid, uh, carrying bag. So we’ll go ahead and take the contents out of that so you can see what you’ve got. Now keep in mind that I’m wearing one of the lavalier microphones right now as I speak, so one of them is not in the package. Um, here’s the other one. It’s just like what I’m wearing, pretty simple. Plug this end into your phone or your camera, and of course, this goes onto your collar or wherever. It’s a little tight. There we go. It’s like the painter powder coating or something right there got stuck, but it’s not too bad. Just happens once. So it comes with extension cords, which I really like. I’ve actually used that already, and this is a Y-splitter and some extra pop filters so you can have both microphones plugged in at the same time, and we’re going to try that out and see how well that works. So here’s the other extension cord that I’ve already used. Get this out of the way so you can kind of see how long it is. Here, I’m sure the length is written somewhere, but I’m not that precise. It’s about yay long, so that’s what’s in the package. Actually, pretty impressed for 20 bucks.

Now before we get too carried away, I wanted to let you hear what it sounds like when I’m standing here just without a microphone. You can hear the reverb and the echo in my garage. It’s a pretty big space and not a lot of fabric, so that goes quite a bit. Now I got the microphone on, but it’s not plugged in. Next, I’m going to plug it in and let you hear the difference. Now normally, I wouldn’t want you seeing all these wires and stuff that’s hooked up. I would have the extra extension on here if I was going to walk this far away from the camera. I’m probably going to say eight to ten feet away from the camera at this point, and I’ve only got one extension plugged in. I’ve got a whole other extension that I could use if I needed to get further away, and I’ll do that here in a minute. Uh, but for now, I’ve got the lavalier mic plugged in, and I’m not talking nearly as loud as I was last time, so you can hear the difference simply, you know, from me having the mic plugged in.

So here I am all the way on the other side of the garage. We’re probably about 15, maybe 18 feet away from the camera, and I’ve really got to project and yell to get my voice all the way over there so that you can even hear me. And I’m sure that the reverb and echo is just terrible. Now I’ve got all this stuff hooked up and ready to plug in so I can give you a demonstration of that, but right now, obviously, it’s not plugged in. Now this is both extensions. I think each extension is six and a half feet, so that gets you 13 plus to probably, I don’t know, two or three feet from the actual microphone itself, which will get you to about 50 or 16, which is about where I’m standing. So let me go and plug this in, and we’ll see if it makes a difference.

Okay, so here I am standing in the exact same spot. I’m using a very conversational volume. As a matter of fact, if you were standing right next to me here in the garage, you may even have a hard time hearing me because I’m not talking loud at all. I’m not even talking as loud as I normally do to someone standing right next to me, but I’m kind of a loud guy sometimes, so take that into account. Anyway, so this is me standing 16 feet away from my phone slash camera with the lavalier mic hooked up and both extensions. This is as far away as you can get comfortably. Now I could probably back up a little bit more and really, really stretch out this cord, but I’m not going to do that. There’s not going to be any situation that I can think of where I’m going to be this far away from the camera during the same time that I’m going to want to speak to the camera because if I do get this far away, generally I’m going to be doing something in the background maybe or doing like a big part of a project or something, and I’ll just voice over that part. There’s no reason for you to have to listen to me jibber jabber while I’m doing that stuff, so I think this is going to work out fantastic.

Okay, so this should be an interesting test. I’ve got the microphones hooked up in interview mode, which means I’ve got one hooked up there, one hooked up there, and then I’ve got a Y-splitter right here in the middle, and this all comes with a kit, so we’ll see how this works. Now I’m not sure if you can see the splitter here on YouTube, but trust me, it’s there. So I’m talking a little loud right now to make sure that you can hear me, but as I walk over here towards my toolbox, I should be able to drop my volume down and get real close to the microphone, and you should still be able to hear me. And then as I back away and walk over here, I’ll increase my volume a little bit and then walk back over toward the garage door where I should be able to lower my voice once again so you can just hear me with a lavalier mic and talk very nice and softly. That’s very nice. That’s a nice microphone. Good microphone. That’s kind of strange, huh? Yeah, okay, so there we go, interview mode.

Now one thing that I’m going to go ahead and try this for fun is I’m going to walk back and forth with your microphones, keeping my volume at about the same level and kind of turning around, and so I can give you an idea of, uh, how it sounds as I’m walking across the room. Now you may want to use something like this if you have a big room and you want to catch sound from all over the place, different locations, so you can hook up microphones basically just like this. So I’m going to go ahead and walk toward my toolbox now, keeping the same volume, and I’m going to go ahead and turn towards the camera, towards the microphone, and turn around to walk now towards the garage door, keeping the same volume, and turn around facing the camera once again and walk back towards my toolbox. And this time I’m going to turn around towards the back wall away from the microphone just to see how that sounds, and I’m going to do the same thing once I get over here to the garage door, turn it around towards my beautiful flag, and now I’ll walk back towards the middle, and I kept the volume the same the entire time, so we’ll see how that goes. But I think it’s pretty impressive.

Now one of the things that I definitely wanted to test with this set was how it sounds in the wind and with a lot of background noise, and this fan will accomplish both of those, and it will also do it without me needing to go outside where there’s like bugs and dirt and stuff. So, uh, let’s see how it sounds. All right, so we got this thing run as high as it’ll go. It’s pretty much rolling right on the microphone, and we’re gonna see how it sounds with random background noise. Now I might try to take some of this out in gross processing, see how hard that’ll be. Maybe you’ll get lucky and I won’t have to do anything. Okay, so let’s give this a try without the microphone. I am basically yelling at the camera right here, but, uh, we’ll see how it goes.

Okay, I don’t know if you can hear me or not over the sound of a truck running, but the truck is now running, and I am yelling at the camera. Okay, I am now speaking much more comfortably and not actually yelling at the camera, which is still way over there, and hopefully you can hear me a whole lot better. So I’m going to start the truck, and we’ll see how I sound with the engine running. And here I am with the engine running again, not yelling at the camera. Uh, it’s way over there, so everything should be picked up by this, uh, snazzy little microphone right here, so we’ll see how it goes.

So how about we take a little test drive and see how this thing sounds both with and without the microphone while driving at highway speeds? It should be interesting. We’re going to see exactly how well this thing does. I got the, uh, cord caught in the door. Ah, yeah. Okay, so here we are on the interstate. I’m going about probably about 65 miles an hour or so, heading into town. I’m pretty much yelling at the phone at this point, uh, just to make sure that you can hear me. This lavalier mic is not hooked up. I got it on, uh, but it’s not plugged in, so right now what you’re hearing is coming into the phone, uh, the camera, which is a phone. So, uh, you know, I’m spending about, uh, 26, 2700 RPM right here going about 65 miles an hour. Um, so it’ll be interesting to see how this sounds. Just for fun, let’s do this. It’s a nice day outside, you know, sunny, beautiful, perfect temperature, just cruising. It’s cool.

Okay, so here we are, basically the same speed, obviously the same truck. Uh, now I’m using the lavalier mic to pick up my voice now. Uh, I’m not yelling nearly as loud as I was before. I have no idea how much background noise is being picked up by the microphone. It’s a noisy old truck, of course. It’s an ’85. It’s got an inline six in it, so it’s got to spin up pretty high in order to get to going 65, 70 miles an hour, but that’s what we’re doing right now. And I have no idea just how loud it’s going to be, so I’m as interested to hear the results of this as you might be. So let’s go ahead and roll the window down and give that the old testaroo. Whoa, a little bit of a technical difficulty there with a microphone. Clearly, it doesn’t like being close to the window when the window is down.

So we are now on our way home from our little adventure today, and I have moved the microphone over to the right-hand side of my neck, a little bit further away from the window. Hopefully that will take care of this issue. Now what I was saying when I had the window down before was simply that you don’t really want to go too much faster than 70 or 75 in a truck this age with this kind of suspension. It gets a little bit scary, and especially in this truck in particular because it’s got 10-year-old tires. Now it really isn’t very responsible of me to be driving on ten-year-old tires going this fast on the interstate, but hey, you know, by getting to an accident, that’s great television.

All right, here we go. Let’s see if it works this time. Well, there we go, what I would consider to be a semi-successful test of this lavalier microphone. Obviously, I’m not going to be driving it around with the windows down all the time, so that’s not really that big of a deal. Mainly, I got it just so that I wouldn’t have to yell at the phone all the time, and things like the echo in my garage or the background noise from driving the truck around wouldn’t be quite as big of a problem. Now I will likely go ahead and do some audio cleanup in post-processing when I’m cutting together the video, but I’m not too concerned about that as far as this review goes, simply because I’m kind of doing a review of with the microphone versus without the microphone and not so much of this microphone’s quality when, you know, not enhanced after the fact. You know, I mean, I’m going to enhance the audio as much as I can when I do these videos, so, you know, that’s not what I’m testing. What I’m testing is whether or not it’s better with the lavalier microphone than without it and whether or not it’s worth the hassle and the setup of plugging the microphone in, having a big cord running from the phone down through my shirt up to this lavalier right here. Um, that’s really kind of what I’m testing. So, so far, from what little I’ve seen of the uncut videos that I’ve taken, it seems to be much better, so, you know, that’s good, and we’ll definitely take a good look at this video once it’s all done and see how much better the audio quality is with versus without, and if it’s much better with, which I suspect it will be, then I will continue using it for the rest of my videos.

All right folks, so here we go. Final impressions of the 20 Amazon solid 2 microphone interview set that, uh, you saw me using throughout the video. I’m pretty impressed for 20 bucks. Uh, I’m definitely going to keep using it. It makes me sound much better. I don’t have to yell at the camera. It’s a little bit of a pain in the butt to have the wire running down my shirt and going across the floor, but I think I can deal with that for, uh, for what it is. Now obviously it’s got its limitations, but it’s a 20 set of lavalier microphones. I mean, what do you want? You know, it didn’t work so well with the window down in the truck. Um, I noticed it cut out a little bit as I was going over the railroad tracks, and it also cut out just a little bit in the heavy wind of the fan, but, um, I’m not sure what causes that. If it’s some kind of a built-in protection mechanism or if it’s just that the microphone gets overloaded or, heck, I guess it could be the program on my phone. I’m using, uh, Open Camera to be able to use an external microphone on an Android. I mean, come on, Android, get with the program. Really? I can’t use an external mic with your native camera. Anyway, so, uh, yeah, there it is. Like I said, pretty impressed. Um, I will note that during the time when I was walking back and forth from microphone to microphone, I was having some issues with the microphones being picked up by the camera. Um, there were several times I did that bit, and the microphones didn’t work at all, and I’d have to unplug them and then replug them in, and then they would work, and then they wouldn’t work, and then they would work when I only have one microphone plugged in. It always works, so I’m not sure what was going on there. I finally got a bit that was usable, and it does work just if you’re going to use this for an interview or use that configuration, you may just want to keep an eye on that. For me, I’m not really that worried about it. I don’t plan on ever using that. The second microphone is just a backup as far as how I’m going to use it. So, you know, bottom line, four stars. I give it four stars. Definitely, definitely worth the money, and it’s definitely going to improve my YouTube videos. So there you go. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, stick them below, and don’t forget to like and subscribe because that’s pretty cool and really helps me out, especially because I’m, you know, just starting. So thanks guys, we’ll see you next time.

Hey folks, Ed here from Bullnose Garage. Welcome to the inaugural episode of Bullnose Garage right here in my brand new garage, which I finished like literally just a few days ago. Um, so that’s what this episode’s going to be about. Since it’s the first episode and it’s a channel called Bullnose Garage, let’s talk about the garage, um, what I did to it, how I got where I’m at, uh, why I’m super thrilled with how it turned out, and, uh, why I did the things that I did. So maybe if you ever want to do your own garage renovation, uh, you can get some ideas. So away we go! Let’s get this truck out of here so I can show you what we did.

Okay, so here we are in the garage. It’s about 18 wide by like 22 deep and about, uh, eight to nine feet high depending on which side of the room you’re on. I got a flat roof; it’s a little bit sloped. It looks like a sieve. Flat roofs suck. Welcome here, Mexico! Anyway, um, when I started working on my truck, I figured I’d need a nice space to do it in, so this is what I came up with. The first thing that I had to do was actually tear back all the walls to the studs all the way around this hall back over here. So this garage wasn’t original; they added it onto the house and they just built it right up next to the house, right on top of the stucco. So there was actually a layer of drywall, then stucco, then drywall, then the studs. So that was a lot of fun. Had to pour some concrete, do some other stuff. Basically, it was a whole lot of work. But let me give you a tour and I’ll tell you exactly some of the stuff that I’ve added to make this garage my own.

Okay, so starting off in one of the more busy corners of the garage, uh, I’ll show up in the corner. I got my security camera; that’s an IP camera. It’s power over Ethernet. I added that because a lot of plastic car insurance companies ask that you, uh, store the car or vehicle area secured, your garage or storage facility, and they give you discounts and stuff if you have cameras. And when the walls are down, it’s much easier to run Cat5 cable, so I went ahead and did that. I also put cameras all around the perimeter on the outside and have them hooked up to a computer with, uh, camera software on it. So there’s that.

You’ll also notice all the way around the garage that I have a whole lot of outlets. You can never have too many electrical outlets to support that. I had an electrician come in and set me up with a power panel just for the garage. Uh, this house wasn’t 200 amp service; it was only 100 amp service, so we had to upgrade to 200 amp service. That was a significant chunk of change that went into the renovation budget, but had to be done. Um, and now I also, down here, I don’t know if you can see it because I’ve got this in the way here, um, but I’ve got a spot here for 220. So if I ever wanted to have a welder or a very large air compressor or anything over there, I could do that. Of course, got the air compressor, engine tools, lift, voice, all that fun stuff, air hose, power wheel, the works over here.

Now here’s a very important part of the garage: my AC unit. That’s a mini split from Mr. Cool. I was going to do a Mr. Cool DIY, um, but I decided to go ahead and get one of their regular units that’s installed by an HVAC technician because I’m not an HVAC guy, and when it comes to being comfortable, uh, I want to make sure it’s done right, so I’ll let him do that. Other than that, over here, the only thing that’s significant is all the cabinets and stuff. Believe it or not, I got all of these cabinets from a local university for basically like 15 bucks apiece. This is from Public Surplus. If you go to publicsurplus.com and register, look for your area. A lot of times, government agencies, universities, cities, that kind of stuff are auctioning off things just like this, uh, for dirt cheap. So it’s a whole lot cheaper than going out and buying, you know, fancy cabinets or toolboxes, that kind of stuff, and it works great, you know? There we go. And these actually happen to have a little workshop that I can use, so it works out great.

This cord over here, pretty basic stuff, a couple of toolboxes, um, another great big cabinet from a local university. These things are great; they’re awesome. Like, I can’t get over just, uh, how well they work and how cheap they were. So one of the things that you’ll notice if you’re paying attention is that all of my outlets at this level in the garage have USB ports, and that’s so that I can plug in USB things like my phone or these awesome lights from Harbor Freight. These things are great; I love them. I can just keep that plugged in and I don’t have to worry about whether or not it’s going to be charged when I need it. All of the outlets at the same level in the garage have USB ports, just like that.

One of my favorite parts about this garage, believe it or not, is this window. Now, that’s probably stupid, but I just love this thing. I love these blinds that are inside the windows like this. You don’t have to worry about cleaning them or nothing. Like here in New Mexico, everything gets dusty and dirty after just a matter of minutes, really. It’s crazy. And so, yeah, inside the window, you don’t have to worry about that. It’s up and down so nice. Yeah, so my old door was just a plain Jane door with no window. You know, I wanted to be able to look out and see a bird or something every now and then, so it’s pretty neat. I’m probably more excited about it than I should be, but I can’t help myself.

Now we come to the brains of the garage. You see behind me this ginormous television, which is hooked up to a computer system up there. Um, what you see above the computer is actually my POE switch for my cameras. They go into the computer so I can actually look at my cameras on the television or I can surf the web or Fire TV, any of that kind of stuff that I want. Now this is here because I’m not an expert when it comes to working on vehicles. Um, this truck is pretty much the only endeavor that I have when it comes to working on engines or even digging into some of the more technical stuff when it comes to how things run. So because of that, I rely a lot on YouTube and forums and a lot of online resources. So I set this up in such a way so that if I’m over here working on the truck with the hood open, I can just look over at the TV and look at, you know, whatever video I’m needing to get information from or if it’s, like I said, a schematic or a drawing or any of that kind of stuff. So that’s what that’s there for.

Now eventually, right here behind me, I’m going to put a workbench. Um, I haven’t got it built yet, but that’s one of my next projects. And of course, I’ve got my desk, which also serves this sort of work area and a sound system so I can listen to some music while I work. You can see here one of the speakers that’s in my ceiling. I’ve got four of them for the garage. The speaker system also extends out to the patio, and we have a pool that’s got a couple of rock speakers out there. Um, I mean rock like, you know, Van Halen. I mean rock like they’re shaped like a rock so that they don’t look like speakers. Uh, anyway, those are out by the pool so when we’re out at the pool swimming, we can get some tunage, um, and I can also listen in here. And that’s all controlled from the receiver that you see down in the lower left corner of your screen. In this image, you can also see the LED lights that I have set up in the ceiling of the garage. I have also added a little bit of mood lighting just in case I don’t want the stark bright and white of every piece. This was more for fun than anything else, but I’m pretty happy how it turned out.

Here you can see a little bit better my layout for the LED lights. Now these are just super cheap, simple LED lights you can get them from Amazon. The brand name is Barina, and they’re meant to replace the old fluorescents. And I gotta tell you, these things are amazing. They light up this garage like it’s daytime even when it’s nighttime. Uh, so I love them; they’re fantastic. And finally, over here, I’ve got right now what I’m calling my general purpose workbench. Um, it’s probably going to end up being an electrical workbench. I have a 12-volt tester and some other things coming in that I’ll use for, uh, moaning. I may go so far as to rebuild the harness in that truck. I’m not quite sure what I’m gonna do yet, but, uh, yeah, this gives me a space to do all that. Might get myself a drill press, make myself a belt sander or a tabletop sander and grinder, fill this place out so I’ve got some, you know, place to do some real work.

Another one of my favorite things in this garage is the jack shaft garage door opener that sits up there in the corner. So that door opener actually connects right to the torsion bar of the garage door and rolls it open from there without having to have this big clunky overhead chain and garage door opener system with the rail and everything. I wanted everything sort of above my head to be nice and clear just in case I ever wanted to paint, you know, paint a vehicle. That way I can get up and get tall, and especially with the truck, you know, spray paint down. So I didn’t want all that garage opener hardware in the way, and this jack shaft builder solves that problem.

Now the final thing that I’ll talk about here in the garage today is the floor. Now this floor is an epoxy floor; it’s from Armor Epoxy, and it consists of three parts. There’s an epoxy primer, the actual epoxy color itself called racing blue, and then there’s a top coat. In my case, I got what they call a military grade top coat and, of course, the flakes and everything else that goes with it. And I have this mat down here to drive the truck on because the truck does leak just a little bit of oil, and I don’t want all that oil getting on my brand new floor. Now it is a garage floor, and it will get messy and dirty, but for right now, it’s so pristine that I just can’t bring myself to drip anything on it. I do have a review of the Armor Epoxy product coming up where I talk about how it went down and what I think of it, how easy it was or how hard it was to put in, so look forward to that.

So there you go, that’s the Bullnose Garage as it sits today. Like I said, I just finished it probably about last week, so I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of new things going in and a lot of changes being made over time. But if you have any questions about anything that you see, any questions about how I did something or why I did something, or comments, criticisms, you know, it’s the internet, so I’m sure there’s those. But yeah, have any of that stuff, uh, drop it down in the comments, and, uh, we’ll see you next time.