Review of very low cost condenser mic's on e-bay

GaryNattrass

GaryNattrass

Veteran
I just bought a couple of these very low cost chinese condenser mic's off e-bay just to see what they were like as I have used the Takstar brand for a few years now with good results.

I paid £8.99 each for two I bought and that works out around $12 USD inc delivery.

They arrived within two weeks, boxed with a very nice metal suspension mount, a wind gag, USB audio interface and an XLR to 3.5mm jack cable ??? .

The mic body is all metal and like the classic Neuman they are modelled on the base screws off revealing a circuit board with a few surface mount components on. The XLR is metal too with a locking slot and the grille and body are well finished and quite substantial. Looking thru the grille I can see a single capsule that is around 15mm across and the whole mic is quite compact at around 160x50 mm.

There are no high pass filters or -10db pad fitted but the spec seems good and they certainly seem to take the levels from the Gretsch drums kit that they are currently being used on as overheads.

As for the sound I was prepared for them to be quite average but hell no these sound just as good on voice as some of the other mic's I have. They can pop a little if too close but the wind gag will help that and adding a high pass filter at 80-100hz will also help this. They are quite tight cardioid and will be ideal as a general purpose mic for all sorts of recording, they may be a little heavy for boom work but the suspension is worth the money on it's own. They are quite high gain so I could not detect any noise problems and they sound very clean.

You can also get them in various colours and if you want a real bargain the pink coloured ones with silver grille are currently on the UK e-bay for just £5.99 each and that is around $8 USD inc delivery.

I will try to post some sound samples but if you are after a low cost voice over or general purpose mic for recording these are an absolute bargain.

P.S Oh and the XLR to 3.5mm cable ???? As these are condenser mic's they need phantom power to work so a standard XLR to XLR cable is required for a mixer but as they provide you with a USB audio interface dongle you can plug this into your laptop or computer and it seems to feed the correct power down the supplied XLR to 3.5mm cable so it can go straight into your edit software or be used as a podcast mic.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/like/Flou...9045&clkid=8641519960519573319&_qi=RTM2063750
 
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Thanks for this, Gary.

The link you posted notes that the item may not ship to the US. HERE is a link to a seller shipping to the States.
 
Wow, you can't even buy an empty, unfinished shell for several times that price.
A rather tiny 15mm capsule is rather modest for such an impressive (even gaudy) enclosure.

Curious how they can make a circuit that appears to operate on both 3.5mm "plug-in power" (~5V) AND 48V phantom power!

I have a couple of C3 capsules from Sony C37A mic. Those Takstar mics would make decent "body donors" for a construction project.
I just ordered 4 of them from the US listing. Thanks Gary and Alex.
 
Thanks for the posting and the US eBay link

How do you imagine using this type of mic?

Be well.

Rob
Smalltalk.Productions
 
Unfortunately large diaphragm, even fake ones, are not much use for filmmaking. Would that it twas not so, as my very best sounding mic is a large diaphragm mic, a real one, that I intended for voice overs. However I would need a real sound booth to use it, as my apartment can not be quieted down enough for it not to pick up all kinds of noise. That includes recording from in the clothes closet, I did try that.

I own 11 mic's some of them as cheap as $10, and all except one of those will produce professionally acceptable recordings. Sure you could tell the difference between them and an expensive mic in an A/B test, but in a recording the sounds are good.

One of the things that makes a big difference is that the guy bragging about how great his $5000 mic sounds probably has a $25000 recording chain too. No one is going to be able to tell my MXL 2003A ($175) from a U87 on our builtin camera amps.
 
This mic would be ideal for voice overs or narration and if you had to record acoustic instruments or choir / vocals indoors. I am personally using mine on my drum kits as overheads.

The styling may be a little garish for some and not suit in vision work but I quite like the classic looks and the gold grille.

As a side note we used U87 on our fisher booms for TV work but I appreciate that this mic is a little heavy and large for use on a pole.
 
Here are some others
A bottle style for $13

Side adress slanted grill $13

Side address round grill $14.29

Just plain silly prices. Two the listings mention
-Neodymiun magnet for high signal-to-noise ratio
Click to expand...
which make no sense for a "condenser" microphone, but they also talk about needing phantom power so?

If nothing else they make good looking props. But I suspect that they also sound decent. "Back in the day" a cheap mic (as in maybe $30) generally sounded like a cheap mic, noisy and bad fidelity. But these days the Chinese are knocking out surprisingly decent incredibly cheap mics. I would call them knock offs but they aren't really, nobody is going to mistake these for a $3,000 mic even if the "look" is borrowed from classic designs.

If the capsules are all the size Gary mentioned then they are essentially small diaphragm condensers tarted up to look like large capsule mics. But that is still a great price if they are decent.
 
I would agree that these are small diaphragm condenser mic's and generally sound the same as most of the similar type of mic's I have, but better than the Takstars as they have higher gain and a fuller sound.

As they are a lot smaller bodied than the SE or Rode mic's I have the capsules are proportionate to the 160x50mm bodies and a larger diaphragm would simply not fit in the grille. The capsule also seems to be suspended in a larger surround within the mic body.

Still sound very good for the money and certainly very well made with metal bodies and suspension mounts.

I just ordered two more of them and a couple of the bottle style ones for use on my guitar amp's although they were only $14 for the pair as they are the pink ones.
 
Talking about low cost microphones. My Sony PDX10 came from a well known dealer with a cheap ($15) shotgun mic on it instead of the Sony mic it was supposed to have (They gave me a pretty hefty partial refund when I pointed it out to them). It seemed to do okay. Just now, I used the calibrated oscillator in the FP42 mixer to set the gain on the camcorder, then tried that $15 plastic mic.

From 5 feet away with the input gain set at 4-5 on the mixer, I was getting 3/4 scale on the cameras monitor, with a soft conversational level voice, with the limiter LED's flashing now and then. There seems to be two look alike versions of this mic on eBay. The better one having a higher sensitivity figure and a wider frequency range. I see the same mic priced from about that $15 to about $45. It is usually described as an interview microphone, with no brand name.

How do they do that?
 
The sensitivity isn't the only criterion for mic's sound quality.
Apparently such mics aren't expansive to produce (in China).
 
I had a look through the category and it is strange how there is little no love for the pencil condenser design since these are really small diaphragms. I was hoping to get a couple pink extra SDC's for times when you need to mic everything. For $15 why not!
 
I bought a couple of ISK "Little Gem" mics and donated them to a worthy cause who needed them. But they were so good, they bought four more of them and I am going to buy at least another pair. Remarkably good for the cost (US$49) complete with omni, card, and hyper capsules, foam gag, and clip. But no rosewood box with gold-plated hinges and clasp.

http://www.iskproaudio.com/collections/microphones/products/little-gem

ZUB_3976_1024x1024.jpg

They also have a model called "Pearl" which may be the tooling from the company that was counterfeiting Oktava.
But they appear to be "Sold Out".

ZUB_4707.jpg
 
So, Richard, would you use that Isk with the hypercardioid capsule for an indoor boom mic on a micro budget shoot?
 
Nice find. I will have to listen with better headphones. The cheap ones that were at the computer didn't sell me, but I know these headphones are not great.
BTW if you dig a bit you can find the tracks with out reverb etc for their mic demo videos.
 
Let us know how it turns out. Are the mics 16mm in diameter? The site says element size but I am not sure if that is the outer dimension or not. Thanks.
 
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