VoiceView is, at its core, will read any selected text on your display. If your tablet is highlighting icons and text with a green box, then reading that information out loud, you may have accidentally activated Screen Reader mode on your device. You can also tell that this mode has been activated on your device when you see a square icon in the top-left corner of your notification panel at the top of the display. If Screen Reader is enabled, you’ll likely find yourself having difficulty navigating around your tablet, specifically if you didn’t mean to turn on Screen Reader and are unable to correctly navigate around the tablet with your taps and swipes. In this mode, your normal swipes and taps don’t activate the traditional features of the device. This is laid out in the tutorial provided for Screen Reader, but if the mode has accidentally been activated by you or another family member, it may seem impossible to properly disable the mode. How to Disable VoiceView AKG D19 Another appearance of one of the most commonly used Beatle mics. This cardioid dynamic mic was an Abbey Road favourite, being pressed into service on everything from overhead and piano, to acoustic guitar. Much of the recording gear in the Shepperton Studio scenes appears to have been borrowed from Abbey Road and the band themselves.

We also don't have an official number for the Fire HD 10 2021's refresh rate, but from our tests and given the price we're almost certain it's 60Hz, like most affordable slates. Compared to the Echo Show 8, the Fire HD 10 in Show Mode had an almost identical response time to our voice commands and queries. Anyone thinking about buying the smart display could easily invest in the tablet instead, leave it in your kitchen to answer questions, then take advantage of its portability for streaming or work. Shure Unidyne III 545 cardioid dynamic mic, seen in Shepperton Studio, the unpainted progenitor of the world famous SM57.Neumann U67/U87 valve and FET multi-pattern large diaphragm condenser mics both for electric guitar cabs and on acoustic. On Vocals The reason for this is a combination of both look and suitability of the mic for the job, with each feeding into the other. Certainly there’s no doubt that using an end-fire mic with decent built-in pop protection is less intrusive in use, especially when speaking to camera is involved. This particular form factor often comes in dynamic form as opposed to condenser; this is almost certainly down to convention as much as anything else. The Originals The M3 feels robust, and the supplied stand adaptor looks unbreakable. I ran the mic on phantom, from an installed battery, and with phantom when the battery was installed... and it worked perfectly on each occasion. I couldn't test battery life as such, but I inserted a partly used PP3 and it was still going happily after being left on for the best part of a week. While the large diaphragm studio condenser mic has been a familiar sight in studios for the last 70 years or so, more recently the large diaphragm end-fire dynamic mic has enjoyed increasing prevalence in the independent creator’s studio. Many would agree that it’s hard to buy any mic that won’t turn in usable results when used properly, yet some designs always seem to find a home within any given group of mic users. Of these, looking the part might be more important to some than others, and the creator/podcaster/YouTuber sector especially has welcomed the ‘big-mic-on-suspension’ look with open arms. Hidden away just above the battery compartment inside the mic is another three-position slide switch. The good news is that this one is labelled. The bad news is that you can't adjust it with your fingers — you'll need a small screwdriver or pen. This switch introduces a pad between the capsule and impedance converter, offering 0, 10, or 20dB of attenuation, which means that the mic can be used very close to very loud sources.

Overhead - unidentified end-fire mic used at Shepperton Studio. This mic looks like it could be an AKG C28 in the AKG pivot mount or similar AKG preamp body and capsule combo. On Bass Yes the Kindle Fire HD has a built-in microphone. It is located on the side of the unit, right around the corner from the camera. You can use the microphone for making calls in Skype. With the arrival of Kindle Fire HD, you have a camera and microphone that allow you to make video calls with the built-in Skype app. However, there still isn’t what you’d think of a traditional camera, one that allows you to take still photos or videos, as you can with some other popular tablets. I tried it on a wide variety of sources and found it worked superbly well on all of them, capturing every nuance of the sound with great fidelity. On very close vocals the bass tip‑up gave a slightly warm sound compared to some other small‑capsule mics, but it remained detailed and never showed any hint of harshness or a tendency to sibilance. Moving the mic out to about a foot or so from six and twelve‑string acoustic guitars produced a lovely sound, completely free of boomy resonances but with all the complex harmonic structures perfectly intact. On an upright piano it proved equally competent, and even placing it directly in the firing line of a trumpet did not cause any problems (with the windshield on). Since the mic has been balanced to rely on the proximity effect from close working for a flat frequency response it also proved to be relatively immune to handling noise and stand vibrations. And so to the latest addition to the fleet, the SR71, which is marketed as a high‑quality, general‑purpose live sound mic. The good news is that this version has been priced at less than half the cost of Earthworks' other cardioid, the Z30X, which puts it in the same territory as AKG's C1000 and the Rode NT1. Earthworks's literature recommends it for a very wide range of applications, including voices (solo and choirs), guitars, pianos and all other stringed instruments, brass, woodwind (particularly saxophone and flute), percussion, snare drum, bass drum and overheads. There is nothing that makes a noise which this mic isn't ideally suited to, apparently! MechanicsOverall, the performance speeds impressed us. Alexa answered our questions promptly, apps and videos loaded without too much delay, the tablet had little difficulty running two apps at once in split-screen mode, and games ran without noticeable lag or stuttering.

Snare - AKG C28 or C60 small diaphragm condenser or D24 cardioid dynamic . The snare mic appears for only a few frames and is hard to make out, but appears to be an end-fire mic of some kind. On the roof, this mic has a spherical grille or windscreen which could be the D24 or C60/W60 combo that will be known to American readers as the Ed Sullivan mic. If your speakers aren’t working, try plugging in a set of headphones then unplugging them again, or soft reboot your tablet by turning it off and on again. The mic sounds full and smooth when used for close vocals, with a modest airy lift at the high end. To be honest, it sounds considerably more expensive than it actually is — a fairly common theme with Rode mics! There’s a built-in microphone at the very top of the Fire HD 8. If you’re filming video or trying to give Alexa instructions, make sure your Fire tablet is pointing in the right direction.

When I first laid hands on the Earthworks mics for the July '98 review I was extremely impressed with the QTC1, which still remains a favourite omnidirectional microphone, and although I felt the Z30X was overpriced at the time (it was subsequently 'repositioned', I'm pleased to say), it also proved itself to be a very capable microphone indeed with a fantastically smooth frequency response both on‑ and off‑axis. Its very broad polar response would not suit every situation, though, and even the 'enhanced cardioid' version (Z30XL) was not quite as precise in its rearward rejection as might have been liked. However, the particular blend of characteristics and compromises made by Earthworks resulted in a very usable and fine‑sounding microphone.

At 2kHz the SR71 exhibits an almost perfect textbook cardioid response with a fantastically sharp rear null, but at higher and lower frequencies this is less well defined, although never worse than 12dB of rejection from 500Hz up to 4kHz. Above this point the response starts to move towards hypercardioid, with small side nulls at 135 degrees in place of the 180 degree ideal. In Use Rode have been in the electronics business in Australia since the late 1960s, but the company became better known around the world after 1998, when they started producing a cost-effective range of microphones. Over the last decade or so Rode have rewritten the book when it comes to the cost and performance of studio microphones, and there can be few project studios without at least one Rode mic in their collection. The latest offering is a new multi-purpose electret cardioid design, called the M3 — essentially a cardioid electret version of the hypercardioid NT3 (which has a true capacitor capsule). On paper the response curve looks quite similar to that of the TM-180, with its 9-10 kHz lift. The capsule is again a dual-diaphragm, 34mm diameter affair utilising a centre-terminated, gold-coated diaphragm, but I can’t tell whether it is the same capsule as used in the TM-180 or not. While the nominal frequency response is again shown as 20Hz to 20kHz, this mic is the quietest of the models we were sent, with a signal-to-noise ratio of 80dB. The sensitivity figure is -36dB ±2dB (0dB=1V/Pa at 1kHz) and the SPL handling 135dB without the pad engaged. Peeking inside reveals two circuit boards populated with good-quality discrete components, but this time around there’s no transformer.There are no clear shots of the mics used on the Lowrey or Rhodes. A U67 or U87 is visible in one scene on the Hammond’s Leslie speaker, and this certainly would have been in keeping with the other mics used on cabinets. It looks like the rest of the time the Leslie speaker is mic’d from behind with the non-louvred panel removed. As mentioned above, the most obvious equivalent is the AKG C1000S, compared with which the Rode M3 has a smoother, wider bandwidth, greater headroom, near-identical noise and sensitivity, and similarly flexible powering arrangements (although, to be fair, the AKG mic will accept phantom power down to 12V). This neat little mic is incredibly versatile - and it sounds a lot more expensive than it actually is. Activating Screen Reader: You may well be wondering how Voice View could possibly be activated on your device if you never went into the settings menu to activate it. Wonder no longer: VoiceView has a shortcut enabled so that the setting can be toggled on easily without having to enter the settings menu. To activate Screen Reader, press and hold the device’s power button until the power-off message appears on your device. Once your device makes a soft chime, press and hold two fingers down on the display for five seconds. You’ll hear a voice tell you to keep holding your fingers down to activate VoiceView; release your fingers to cancel the mode activation or keep holding your fingers down to finish the process of enabling the tool. This shortcut only works for enabling the setting; you’ll still have to follow the above steps to disable it. The polar pattern seemed fairly tight and well controlled across most of the frequency range — a good result for a mic at this price — and that should allow use as a coincident or spaced stereo pair, perhaps above drums or on pianos. However, I wouldn't recommend using M3s for distant stereo miking, as I think the self-noise and low output would result in a relatively noisy recording. For example, my favourite Sennheiser MKH40s (that I use regularly for distant miking) have a self-noise figure that is 9dB lower, and an output level which is 12dB higher. But then they also cost about 24dB more.... It's a case of horses for courses, and the M3 is exceptionally good for the price, easily matching or exceeding the specs and performance of its nearest competitors.