Hollyland Lark M2S Review – Small, Light, and Excellent

Hollyland Lark M2S Review – Small, Light, and Excellent

In this article, we are reviewing the Hollyland Lark M2S wireless solution. The Lark M2S is a dual transmitter-to-single receiver pack that can be used with a mirrorless camera or a phone, thanks to its included secondary receiver. This is, without question, the smallest and lightest wireless pack I have ever used. Check out how small this microphone is right here! Let’s get into it.

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About & Disclaimer

Welcome to the website, folks. My name’s Shane. In this article, we are checking out a brand new wireless pack from the folks at Hollyland—this is the Lark M2S wireless pack. If you’re already subscribed, you’ll know that I have reviewed a bunch of wireless packs over the last few years, and I’ll be putting this new pack through its paces here.

We’ll cover the best settings, check the reliability and noise cancellation feature outside, and I’ll compare it against a few other well-known packs in terms of audio quality and performance.
Before we get into it, a huge thanks to Hollyland for sending a pair of these out to my YouTube channel, I really appreciate it. If you want to check these out I’ll leave a link below.

Unboxing

Let’s cover everything in the box. First, we get some instructions, a warranty card, and a quick start guide. Included is a charging case that not only helps keep everything organized but also charges without being plugged in. There are two transmitters; as you can see, these are tiny. Two slip-on windscreens for using these packs outdoors are included—and we will test that coming right up!

There’s an on-camera receiver and a separate USB receiver for use with phones. While the receiver is USB-C, there’s a Lightning adapter included in the pack to make it work on an older iPhone like mine. Haha. There’s a USB-A to USB-C cable for charging the case, and a drawstring bag that can be used to carry everything easily. While I have the Lark M2S mini Combo to test, there’s also a version of the pack with only the USB-C phone receiver, which is cool. You can pick the best pack for your shooting situation.

Unique Design

As I mentioned at the start, this is the smallest wireless pack I have ever personally used. The transmitters only weigh 7 grams, which is almost unnoticeable on your shirt. Ideally, you want to clip it on like this if you’re wearing a t-shirt or top, but with a shirt like this, it sounds fine in this position.

The transmitters have a maximum runtime of 9 hours and a charging time of approximately 1 hour. Given how small they are, I am sort of shocked at the battery life. The receiver is also arguably the smallest one I have ever seen, and it has a maximum runtime of 8.5 hours. With a full charge, the case is designed to recharge the entire pack at least twice, which is great. The case itself will take about 1.5 hours for a full charge.

The good news is that even if the case isn’t charged, it will begin charging the receiver and transmitters as soon as it’s plugged in. The phone receiver plugs directly into your mobile, so it’s completely passive and doesn’t require charging, which is cool.

Unlike many of the other packs I’ve tested recently, there’s no on-screen display. Instead, everything is color-coded with LED lights or flashing displays, so you know exactly what is going on.

Stereo / Mono Mode

You can switch to stereo mode by holding the volume control knob down for 3 seconds. The blue light indicates stereo mode, while the green light is for mono mode. The volume knob has three adjustable levels between high, medium, and low, and for my LUMIX cameras with the gain set to -16dB, low did the job fine.

Both transmitters support noise cancellation by pushing the button on the side until the light goes green. The light will be blue if the noise cancellation is not on. I suggest leaving this off for most situations, but we’ll test it out later.

This pack uses 24-bit depth audio quality, so as long as your camera has decent audio preamps, you’ll get a nice clean signal recorded at the end. This pack is rated to a distance of 300m line of sight and has new anti-interference technology built in – which we’ll test shortly.

Before I forget, if you use the camera receiver, it supports stereo recording, whereas the mobile receiver only uses dual-channel mono recording.
The microphone is omnidirectional, meaning it’s designed to pick up sound from all around it. You know what, let’s go outside now and test it out.

What’s Missing

There are really only two sacrifices to a transmitter this small: there’s no 3.5mm LAV mic connection anywhere. If you want to use a LAV mic with this system, you’ll be looking elsewhere. That said, the whole idea of this pack was to create a super compact solution that sounds great, and so far, I am very impressed with the audio quality into my Panasonic S5II and GH7 cameras. There’s also no internal recording, which means there’s no 32-bit float audio recording either.

The microphones included on the transmitters are quite full range, so I find I need to add a de-esser or drop the high frequencies in post production.  I can live with this because overall they sound a lot better than many of the Wireless packs I have reviewed in the past.

Get the best price here: 🛒 B&H – Amazon AU – Amazon UK – Amazon Canada (affiliate links)