you know what Society is like these days if I just come out and
say and that sound bite hits the internet boom cancel and with the number
of people working here that would be a pretty rough day for a lot of
hardworking families but guys I got to
be me and if I can't loudly Proclaim
that then how could I even drag myself to the office every morning that is
where this little guy comes in it discreetly prevents your conversations
from being recorded on someone else's phone hidden microphone or voice
recorder and as you can tell when I say I don't know
uh it even works against the professional lavalier microphone that
I'm wearing it's not perfect though and it comes with some serious downsides so
before you trust your most intimate secrets to one of these bad boys you
should probably watch past this super edgy Saveway to our
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link down below the marketing images for the f11 antio recording bug wire tapping
audio 37 emission hole of ultrasound interference anti EES dropping spy
device device are a gold mine of dubious
claims the recording Terminator 37
launch heads anti-ice recorder recording
it even claims to have anti- video recording uh here let's try it can can
you guys see me when I flick the button okay well that last one seems to
be nonsense but how does it disrupt the
sound recording the way that it does is it just blasting out white noise so loud
that you can't hear me no because believe it or not when you guys are
hearing that mess from the Jammer none of us in
the studio are picking that up we can all hear each other just fine I can hear
it okay but you have headphones on let
me explain many of you will already know how microphones work here's a microphone
shaped like a cookie good job but for everyone else the tldr is that they
typically contain a thin membrane called a diaphragm that gets vibrated by
incoming sound waves that vibration is turned into an electrical signal
Amplified and the rest of the details don't really matter for now what does
matter is that a microphone's response to different frequencies of vibration is
nonlinear meaning that it varies from
high-pitch noises to low pitch noises
this weakness is what Jammers like this one can take advantage of by blasting
out sound waves at frequencies that are higher than the typical human can hear
they can shake the mic's diaphragm
around like crazy in the frequencies that we can hear and make it impossible
for a hidden mic to pick up my secret confessions we're going to link a couple
of papers in the description if you want to get into the math for how it works
but for now let's look at this clip that we recorded earlier with a calibrated
measurement microphone wow just from
looking at the waveform it's pretty obvious where the
Jammer turns on and where the Jammer turns off but what's happening at the
different frequencies this right here is a spectrogram and it visually represents
the intensity of sound waves in each frequency from 0o Herz at the bottom all
the way up to 90 plus kilohertz up top
the brighter the display the more intense the sound waves are at that
frequency let's blow this up though and take a closer look we mere humans can
typically only hear sounds in about this range right here from 0 to 20 khz or
20,000 Herz of course that's when we're young and it tends to narrow as we age
especially at the high end but as you can see over here that's not really that
big of a deal given how much of human speech takes place within that range of
course once the Jammer kicks in you wouldn't have any chance of making out
any sounds with this level of intensity with all of this noise this still
doesn't tell us the whole story though and
hence let's zoom in on just a second or
two of our jammed section here you can see right here is where our Jammer turns
on all of the high-intensity sounds are being generated above that range of
human hearing but by choosing specific
intervals they're able to induce vibrations that spread to cover the
entire spectrum and you can see that
once you've got this much noise it's basically impossible to make out regular
human speech and it's not just our crappy meat ears that are defeated by
this check this out I've got a speech to text app on this phone and with the
Jammer turned off the app does a pretty respectable job of transcribing what I'm
saying but as soon as we turn the Jammer
on and the AI would have no idea that I
just confessed one of my deepest darkest secrets so
that's it then video over uh everyone go buy one of these uh see you
later no not quite you see the
advertising heavily features corporate boardroom type use cases for it so to
validate that we set up our Jammer in our meeting room and ran a few
experiments starting with probably the least realistic scenario where our
recorder here isn't trying to hide what he's doing the Jammer works admirably
but that's not a huge surprise even
AliExpress specials like this one rarely
completely don't work at all what was a
surprise though was that we almost exploded Elijah's head the first time
that we turned it on and he didn't have any hearing
protection it's really aggressive go
again as it turns out just because most
mere mortals can't hear what's coming out of the Jammer some can and some
especially can for this reason while
devices like this are legal here as far as we can tell we have no data
whatsoever on the long-term health and safety effects of using a device like
this and their use could be either dangerous or restricted by your local
government so your mileage may vary on
that note let's turn our attention to a more realistic scenario where at least
one of us call
at least one of us is trying to hide what we're
doing our spy now has his device on his lap under the table and since we don't
trust each other I probably don't want him to know that I have this Jammer so
I've hidden it next to this potted
plant what it's a common plant the ca are I just activate all three switches
so we're blasting out in all directions and then I can say
regardless of the hiding spot the result ended up being about the same there's
enough noise bouncing around in the room to mess up the recording however if our
Target is sensitive to high-pitched noises like the whine of an old tube TV
they're likely to know that something is a miss and if our spy tries to get even
a little bit sneakier by tucking their recording device under their clothing
especially under a couple of layers of clothing well watch this guys I'm about
to reveal that snake kills
Dumbledore and there's nothing anyone can do to prevent me from being an any
questions
Colin sure the point is it turns out that
again regardless of the relative positions of our recording device and
our Jammer a couple layers of cloth are so effective at blocking these super
high frequency noises that they do a remarkable job of reducing its
Effectiveness which got us thinking up until this point all the mics we've
tried have been tiny either literally tiny like these mems or Micro
electromechanical Systems microphones like you would find in a phone a voice
recorder or a smart home hub or figuratively tiny like the small
diaphragm condenser that you would find in the measurement mic or my lavalier
these two types work a little a little bit differently from each other but what
they both have in common is tiny thin
diaphragms that are easily bounced about in the ultrasonic storm that's created
by the Jammer but of course there's a lot of other types of microphones so we
rounded up a bunch of examples laid them out and managed the cables with our new
magnetic Cable Management from LTT Store.com each mic was tested at the
same distance with the mic pointing straight at the business end of the
Jammer and we found was that it was quite effective against most of the mems
mics and small condensers even including
our shotgun microphone not every mic Was
Defeated however and our first surprise was the sanken cost 11d which is
actually the lav mic that I normally wear as it turns out its diaphragm is
rotated 90° inside its tiny cylindrical
housing so even head on the sound waves
from the Hammer weren't actually hitting the diaphragm in a direct path which
significantly reduces the jamming effect if we check out the spectrogram there's
none of those zigzaggy lines that we saw before at all another one that was
interesting was the zoom h1n recorder that uses two small microphones in an XY
configuration and we found that while both did experience significant jamming
the one that wasn't pointed directly at the Jammer picked up the voice quite
well which prompted us then to test all of our mics either 45 or 90° off of the
source of the interference in addition to our head-on tests so our final
standout then after those tests ended up being come on the mk416 shotgun from
Sennheiser not only did it handle the 45
and 90° tests like a champ but with the Jammer half a meter away blasting down
the barrel it was jammed and then as soon as we pulled back to a meter it was
like the Jammer wasn't even there looking at the spectrogram we can see it
is picking up what the Jammer is throwing down but it's not having a
significant effect on the diaphragm at other frequencies we think there's a
combination of factors that are likely contributing to this while the shotgun
still has a relatively light diaphragm if I were to compare it to a dynamic
stage mic for example it's still larger and heavier than the other small
condensers that we tried making it a little harder for the Jammer to abuse
especially as the mic gets farther from the source also the element is tucked
away deep inside the mic behind this
section called the interference tube which basically makes the mic more
directional especially as the frequency gets higher the result is that less of
those super high frequency waves from the Jammer are going to bounce all the
way down the tube and mix together to mess with our recording but as good as
it is it was no match for larger diaphragm condenser ERS or dynamic
microphones like the venerable sh sm58
or our broadcast quality r20s from the L
show so in conclusion yeah it works but
it's not the Silver Bullet that the advertising would have you believe
pretty typical AliExpress against a casual attempt to record a conversation
it's surprisingly effective but it should be noted that it makes a pretty
unsettling noise that kind of feels like pressure on more sensitive ears and also
realistically a narell could easily hide a heavy diaphragm mic up in the ceiling
over the conference table and catch me off guard that way then again if they've
got that kind of access to the building they could probably just take me out directly instead of waiting for the
Pitchfork wielding mob so I guess I'll
just have to keep my controversial opinions about whether Quebec should
just leave the country already oh damn it was off to myself for
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custom AliExpress headphones for dank pods that was pretty fun he