Review of the Point Source Audio CM i3 Headset | Tech, No Babel

This is Tech, No Babel, your weekly source of church video and graphics: news, perspectives, tips, & tricks.

Hi, and welcome to another episode of Tech, No Babel. This is the show where every week we talk all about using video and graphic design in the church. I’m Paul Alan Clifford; I’m your host and I’d love for you to ask your questions, leave your comments… just join the conversation. So if you’re watching the video leave the video if you have questions or comments and if you’re listening to the audio podcast, you’ve been potentially listening for almost ten years. So you are some of my favorite people and I’d love for you to drop me a line at Paul at TrinityDigitalMedia.com or hit me up on Twitter: PaulAlanClif — P A U L A L A N C L I F.

So today I’ve got something a little unusual I’ve got a review of an audio headset. Now that’s not exactly video, but these are often used in production when we’re talking about the director talking to camera people, etc. So if you have more than one person involved in the live production at your church, you really ought to take a look at this.

So first off this is the one that I have it set up for a clearcom-type system. That’s what we have at my church and that’s what I’ve tested this on. Well let’s start with. My initial reaction is first off. Nice case. This is from point source audio. They’re the ones that manufacture this. And when you unzip it and open it up you’ll find that you have this nifty extension cable which I used this past Sunday because the console mounted base station that was in front of me was farther away than a belt pack which is what I would use it for if I was on a camera so that was a nice thing that I didn’t think that I would use but I used it in a seated position not in a camera position.

Secondly we have this headset now. Mike isn’t anything particularly special it’s fine but, there’s nothing particularly special about the microphone itself. The real magic is in the headset. So let me uncoil this and we’ll start with this this is the default position. Here I’ll turn it sideways if you’re watching the video you can see this. Basically this is kind of like one of those. Over the year headsets that a lot of times speakers use not a countryman style, a thicker one like I think Audio-Technica makes one so kind of like that, but the advantage here is that you can use ear buds with it. So if you’re used to these types of comm systems, you might know I know that they typically use a circumaural designed that you know over your ear look like hearing protection or they use the supra aural design where it’s like the nineteen eighties headphones where it just sits on top of your ear. See allowed external audio which depending on how loud your church is there may not be the right design for you. Both of those have problems. So the circumaural design doesn’t.. well, it’s not very comfortable especially if, like me, you wear glasses. I wear glasses and that at first it feels fine, but after a couple of hours because church is about an hour hour and a half we have two services. So I’m really wearing a headset like that for probably three or four hours on a Sunday and so that makes it…it really gets annoying. So sometimes, like when the pastor’s up, I’ll take one off and let that ear rest and then swap and let the other rest . With the supra aural design—the over the ear design— it doesn’t seal out audio, so that’s kind of the pain, although it’s a more comfortable headset design with this design since it’s ear buds, the real advantage here is that it goes in your ear, blocking out sound like in-ear monitors too. And it also allows you to have a much more comfortable experience. So that’s really nice.

Another advantage of this is here I’m going to show you down here at the connector. You know it’s a four pin female XLR, but just off of that we have this little doohickey which is a mini plug so you can actually replace these ear buds, the ones that ship with this or you don’t have to order it with the ear buds in fact you’ll save like fifty bucks if you’ve got a set of sure in yours for example or let’s say you even really like your earpods from your i Phone, for example. Whatever you want to do you can replace the ear buds that come with it with your favorite ear buds. So that’s really cool.

Let’s say that a lot of production people also have a background in music so our tech and worship director at our church is both a musician so he has in-ears that are custom molded to his ears. He used to work with Hillsong, and he also has and he’s also a tech guy so he has a custom ear buds so he could potentially take something like this and use his in-ears with it so that he gets maximum hearing protection maximum fidelity of the sound and he can use it as just a comm headset so that’s really cool. That’s one thing that I really really like about this.

Another thing is, I don’t know if it’s designed like this, the default listening position is with the wire going over your ear. But one thing that I did last Sunday is I turned it upside down so that I could twist up the microphone so and I wrapped it around my neck. So in doing that the microphone was up in front of my mouth as you see it here and I had a different set of ear buds in my ears so that was pretty cool in that basically I was using i Phone ear buds with the production headset and these were not the Apple iPhone ear buds. I mean it has a mike in everything; I think they were Maxells and I think that I bought them at Wal-Mart for about ten dollars. So very inexpensive, but they’re comfortable and when you’re wearing it for four or five hours at least… I’ve been in situations where I’ve worked basically fifteen hours straight before, not at church, but just in the production world; sometimes it gets crazy. It’s really nice to have a comfortable experience.

Our camera three person, which is our moving camera, he for whatever reason when they ordered their headset they only ordered a single ear probably because you know you put the camera up on your head and it would push up again so what we typically done is taken the foam earbud hearing protection and put those in the unprotected ear if you don’t have one though your ear is just wide open and it can you can really lose a little hearing temporarily in that case. So I told him all about this and he was really excited for it as a product. So those are all the upsides to it.

The down side is I’m having a little trouble getting the wires to stay in. The other downside is that while I have what the side that the microphone is on once I would recommend that you do it because the way the design is you’re basically taking it part way apart and putting it back together, so that’s less than ideal. Also I found that this was just a bit big for my head and I really wish that it was more adjustable.

All in all though I really had a positive experience with this headset. I’ve seen it online for anywhere from three to five hundred dollars. So, shop around because you might get a much better deal if you spend the extra time looking for this headset.

So that is the recommendation and I have I think if I had the budget and I was able to do it I would pick one of these up. And for any church that’s about to go into a comm system with clearcom, etc. I think this is a really great alternative to the traditional headset. It’s really nice to be able to use your own ear buds. It’s really nice to have more comfort especially for longer days and I just think that it’s a great system.

Well I hope that helped you I hope that that was something that could help you and your church as you’re picking up the pace, making a better production, so that people are not distracted by what’s going on in your church. If you like this content, by all means subscribe to either on YouTube, or I really love it if you would subscribe to my email newsletter. You can do that by heading over to TrinityDigitalMedia.com/gifts — G I F T S and there I’ve got all kinds of church tech goodies for you and a free subscription to my e-mail newsletter where I will tell you some of the cool things that are happening at TrinityDigitalMedia and give you some tips and tricks that aren’t published anywhere else as well. Until next time this is Paul Alan Clifford with TrinityDigitalMedia.com