Do you prefer burgers or bratwursts? How about Black Panther or Wolverine? Where you do fall on the Apple or Android side of things? And when it comes to upgrading the audio on your video project, are you better off with a shotgun mic like the Rode VideoMic Pro or a lavalier condenser microphone like the Boya BY-M1? This week’s mic check literally has me beside myself.

For a sizable majority of my life on YouTube, videos were shot on some version of the trusty Flip Mino. When that ship sailed and I decided I didn’t want to shoot my videos on my smartphone, I decided to pick up a $100 vlogging camera. And I thought that’d be good enough for a while.

Well, I couldn’t help myself, so I then upgraded to a new-to-me Panasonic GH2 just a few months later. I already had a couple of micro four-thirds lenses kicking around, but I wanted better audio. So, I used the Rode VideoMicro for quite some time and I more recently switched over to the first-generation Rode VideoMic Pro… but sometimes that isn’t ideal either.

It was cheap enough to give this mic check another experiment, so I picked up the Boya BY-M1 lavalier microphone from Amazon for about $20 US and the above vlog gives you a good sense of just how different it sounds from the Rode VideoMic Pro. I think the Rode is a little cleaner, but the Boya is decidedly more sensitive and the tone is much deeper. My voice sounds so different!

Rode VideoMic Pro vs. Boya BY-M1 lavalier microphone

And even if you’re not so technically inclined and you don’t really care about what microphone I use for my videos, there’s still some fun, contentious points of debate in this week’s vlog. Unleash your inner nerd and tell me: Star Trek or Star Wars? Marvel or DC? Apple or Android?

Let those opinions fly in the comment section below. Let’s fire up some healthy discussion.