IRL (In Real Life) and Mobile Streaming have grown in recent years and making your setup as portable as possible is incredibly important. So how does a 16 gram microphone that isn’t much bigger than a tie clip sound? If it sounds good to you, then the Razer Seiren BT is worth a good look.
In the box, you get the Razer Seiren BT, a selection of a foam and furry windsock for the mic and a short USB-A to USB-C cable for charging. Razer’s packaging and unboxing experience is always impeccable. The snugly backed gear sits in a nice, small box with a magnetic box to close.
The Seiren BT is a tiny Bluetooth microphone meant for connecting to your phone for recording and IRL streams. It has a 48kHz sample rate, 20ms latency and an omnidirectional polar pattern. It’s approximately six centimetres in length with a 3.5 mm input for a lavalier mic, a USB-C port for charging, and a clip to attach to your shirt, jacket, backpack or wherever you find it to be most convenient.
Its charge time is wonderful. In 15 minutes, you can give yourself up to three hours of power on the Seiren BT. Connection to your phone is also quite easy, and the Razer Streaming App gives you some great control over the microphone, including the addition of noise suppression, gain controls, and more.
“So how does a 16 gram microphone that isn’t much bigger than a tie clip sound? If it sounds good to you, then the Razer Seiren BT is worth a good look.”
For me, though, this is where the big positives ended. Mic quality was middling at best, failing to capture a reasonable low end in my voice. It sounded very mid-tone heavy. The noise suppression did ok in a standard outdoor setting, but the processing definitely affected my voice quality.
What is also a little problematic is the fact that most streaming apps don’t support Bluetooth microphones directly. You cannot just stream to Twitch or TikTok with the Seiren BT. You need to use a third-party app that supports Bluetooth. The bad news is that I had no idea where to start. I ended up, after a little research, downloading Larix Broadcaster, which supported Bluetooth and connected to Twitch. My hope was to avoid the need for an extra piece of software when setting up a stream this simple, especially when the options feel so underwhelming.
A price tag of $99 is about what I would expect to spend on a device like this. It would obviously be better to have a mic with some kind of receiver that plugs into your device along the lines of the Rode Wireless Go II or the DJI Mic, but this is designed to be as simple as possible, both for the purposes of pricing and for simple connection.
If I am giving my honest opinion, I wouldn’t recommend this for streaming. It would be a fine budget option for a simple blog setup, though. It is an improvement over the sound you would get from recording directly to your phone. It is incredibly portable, easy to use and fast to charge.
