I Love My Smartphone's Camera ... but I Needed Better Audio. Here's How I Did It

I depend on my smartphone for more than just phone calls, text messages and social media. It's how I shoot all my video content, whether I'm recording my friends while playing a round of golf or covering an event filled 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 almost all new smartphones aren't made for recording dialogue from a distance. If you're a foot away from the phone, in a quiet environment, sound quality is decent, but anything farther of that and you're definitely not getting clean audio without some help.

The $149 Rode Wireless ME is a compact wireless microphone system (one receiver and one transmitter) 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 small black boxes that you can clip on to your shirt or hat and transmit audio to your phone, which also has a small black box plugged into it.

It's super easy to set up -- it takes only a few minutes with the Rode Central app. Once you're connected, you just start recording and the high-quality audio will automatically sync to your video. You can record in your native Camera application or even inside of Instagram, TikTok and any other third-party app with a built-in camera feature.

While the Rode Wireless ME kit comes with only one transmitter and one receiver, Rode also has the Wireless GO II ($289) and the Wireless Pro ($399) systems, both of which offer dual receivers (so that you can record more than one person at once) and additional audio features like 32-bit float on-device recording, timecode sync (Pro) and lavalier microphones (Pro).

Simply put, if you want better audio for your phone videos, you need a wireless microphone system like the Rode Wireless ME.