Customer Reviews

Behringer ECM8000 Omnidirectional Measurement Condenser Microphone

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This goes beyond a microphone. We have been building an audio anechoic chamber (a very quiet room - you shut the door and seal it behind you and suddenly there is no noise at all. It's like your hearing has stopped because you speak and can barely hear yourself - useful for finding the noise floor in microphones and amplifiers)

We purchased an agilent spectrum analyzer and audio generator which cover DC - 900 Khz + and topped it off with a linear transducer . Volume levels are low to maintain linearity but in the anechoic room you don't need much volume.

This microphone was tested among several and we thought at first we had mis-installed our calibration microphone, which led to a comparison between the two.

From 2 Hz to 22,000 Hz the $50 microphone matches our $4500 audio sampling source to within 0.5 dB or less. Above 22,000 hz there is a fast rolloff so that should be thought of as the upper limit. Unfortunately it won't go to ultrasonics which we also test in the chamber for alarm system designs and distance measurement designs.

Just fyi, some microphones were more than 15 dB "off" of our reference standard (they had way too much base response) which is what started us looking at mic linearity. The plots of a reference mic compared to a vocal mic are night and day apart, but some people are seeking out these mic responses to make their recordings sound more or less "rich" on the low end.

There is some self-noise from the mic, but again its lower than other mics tested by 3-6 dB which is substantial.

I am "tuning" my home studio, and this microphone has proved very valuable for that process. Combined with some free software [...] you can get the settings needed for your monitor EQ and eliminate room modes that will make your mixes sound funny. Now I know why my mixes sounded great, but once I played them on a car stereo the bass was way too high. My room was eating up all the low frequencies.