Whether it's to hang out with your paid friends on Discord
or to fulfill your lifelong dream
of becoming a millionaire who works 16 hours a day
and lives in squalor for some reason,
you have found yourself in need of a microphone.
But in a sea of many great options,
why the ever-******, jack eating ****
are you guys all buying this one?
It's not the cheapest, it's not the best quality, probably.
And while I have encountered the brand before,
Fifine isn't exactly a household name, and yet somehow,
it was the Amazon bestseller way back in January,
and now, over six months later, it remains the top dog.
Do you all know something that I don't?
Not for long, you won't.
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or if everyone else is missing out
on the best bang for the buck.
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I guess the first question is why not the Fifine A6T?
It's $47 at the time of writing,
has overwhelmingly positive reviews,
works on PC, Mac, and PlayStation,
and it includes absolutely everything
you need to get started.
The mic itself, a boom arm, a desk clamp, a shock mount,
and even a cute little pop filter with a smiley face on it.
I mean, it's kind of an incredible value.
A setup like this purchased all pieces separately
could easily run you double or more,
and I'm not even talking about a more advanced setup
with a separate XLR microphone and audio interface.
So how are they doing all of this?
It's kind of wild, right?
Because fundamentally, every microphone
from the very cheapest all the way to the most premium
is the same in that it captures the sound
that's coming to it via vibrations in the air
and then outputs that as a mic level signal,
which is basically inaudible.
You then need a preamplifier to convert it
to a line level signal that humans can actually hear.
And finally, you need an analog to digital converter
to convert the waves of analog data into digital data
that your computer can understand.
And yes, all of that is packed
into the devices in your setup,
whether you can point to the discrete components or not.
The difference is that in fully integrated solutions,
they just might be really, really tiny
and or well, really, really cheap,
which raises a huge question here.
I mean, if you can make all the necessary pieces
so small and so affordable, why does anybody spend the extra
on these overkill setups like this one?
Well, the most obvious answer is, of course, quality
compared to our studio mic,
which is the one I'm talking on right now,
or the one that we use for the WAN show, the A6T, mm.
It just doesn't sound that great by comparison,
but we're also being totally unfair.
I mean, considering that the mic itself
is practically thrown in for free
alongside its generous accessory package,
means that I think a more reasonable comparison
would be to a pair of old wired ear pods
that you had lying around,
which as expected, it sounds a lot worse.
We're gonna get into some deeper performance comparisons
a bit later, but first, I wanna talk about
the second advantage of a more advanced XLR setup,
and that's upgradability.
It can be a bigger upfront investment,
that is unless you choose a mic that has both USB and XLR,
but what's nice about it is that you're able to swap out
only your microphone or only your audio interface
if you end up needing something else.
Of course, for some folks, the sheer simplicity
of having a single USB-C cable
trumps any kind of quality or future-proofing advantage.
So let's take a closer look at the A6T.
The mic feels quite a bit cheaper
than it looks in the pictures, actually.
It's shockingly light.
It's side address, which means you talk into it like this,
not like this, and to help you with that,
the pop filter only attaches to it one way,
so you're very unlikely to mess it up.
And the boom arm does actually a pretty darn excellent job
of keeping the mic exactly where you put it,
but is so light that it seems like it could break
at pretty much any time.
And one more thing,
while it is nice that these cable ties are included,
I feel like an upgrade to some better ones
from lttstore.com is in order.
With that said, there's no other way around it.
I gotta give them full marks for ease of setup.
I mean, you don't even need an app.
You just plug it in, and the RGB lights up
to let you know that you are officially a pro gamer.
Forever.
That's right, you cannot customize the RGB
or even turn it off unless you mute the microphone
altogether.
Gain is adjusted with this big old knob on the bottom,
but the indicator is inconveniently positioned
on the bottom, and it doesn't actually correspond
to the position of the dial,
so maybe it would be better to just use software
to tell you nothing.
No, the volume slider on Windows does nothing
with the default drivers for the Fifine.
And the lack of an app means that there are no other drivers
nor is there an official way to add VST plugins
like a noise gate or a compressor and also no audio mixing
like some other microphones allow you to do.
However, you'll know that this isn't a huge mark against it
if you watched our recent video highlighting
some handy audio tools that can take care of that for you,
none of which matters at all
if the mic's performance is unacceptably bad.
So we're gonna start by letting you guys judge
some fairly challenging scenarios.
I'm just gonna, whoop, you know what?
I'm just gonna put it right here
and we're gonna let the Fifine's included shock mount
see if it can handle some desk vibrations
and stuff like that, or, ooh, how about the pop filter?
Pop, pop, popsicle, the plosive, or ice, ice, icicle, baby.
Ooh, ooh, how does it handle gamer excitement?
Pog, pog, pog, pog, gamers say pog, right?
I'm gonna, which way is down?
Oh, bloody hell, I don't know which way is down.
It doesn't matter.
In comparison, the Blue Yeti costs about twice as much
with no accessories other than a desk stand
and sounds about like this.
And just so you don't have to rewind to find it,
and just so you don't have to rewind to find it,
here's what you'd usually hear on the WAN Show.
And now we're back on the Fifine A6T one last time
for your enjoyment or lack thereof.
But for my part, I actually think it sounds
pretty darn okay, but then again,
we didn't hire a labs team
so I could give you my YouTuber thoughts, TM.
Time for some science.
We haven't actually finalized our test suite
or begun testing mics insignificant volumes yet.
So what we did was choose a handful of models
that we felt were either comparable
due to their price and popularity,
or because they might help provide a reference point
for how our A6T performs compared to a bottom
or a top tier solution.
Our reference mic is a Dayton Audio EMM6,
which is a calibrated omni-directional microphone.
Compared to other USB mics,
the A6T performs actually surprisingly similarly
in frequency response, but the drop in this range
suggests that it will have a slightly darker sound.
The Elgato Wave ended up being the outlier
the other way, sounding brighter,
though that did come at the cost
of picking up a little bit more sibilance,
which is your harsh S and ss sounds.
Overall though, the field was close enough
that if you're considering a USB microphone,
we just didn't really find there to be a huge difference
in performance from the worst to the best.
And believe it or not, we kind of see the same thing
when we compare it even to higher end XLR microphones.
Compared to an Electrovoice RE20,
a mic that costs literally 10 times as much
as this entire complete solution,
the on paper results are shockingly close.
And in the real world, the RE20 is better,
but it's certainly not 10 times better.
However, that is under somewhat ideal conditions.
Better microphones can have advantages
that go beyond frequency response.
Like for example, background noise rejection.
If you're alone in a room hanging out
with your friends on Discord,
you do not need a $450 mic, this is great.
With that said, there are cases where frequency response
does tell a big part of the story.
Our third gen AirPods, for example,
really struggled at the high end,
possibly because of their Bluetooth connectivity
or noise cancellation.
But in practice, they sound overall not bad.
But then our wired EarPods have a hole
right in the vocal range
that really does make them sound kind of muffled.
And you can improve this situation
by clipping the mic a little closer to your mouth.
But at the end of the day, the mic is still omnidirectional.
So regardless of its frequency response
or its proximity to the source,
it's gonna pick up any noise around you,
including your keyboard, your mouse,
or your mom yelling at you to get off the darn computer.
Now, unfortunately, we're not set up yet
to test every aspect of a microphone's performance.
Once the lab's website is fully up and running
and we've got our sound chamber,
you're gonna see all kinds of really great stuff.
But not yet.
But we're also not done yet for today.
Let's talk about polar patterns.
Have you ever noticed these small symbols
on some microphones?
That is how well the microphone captures
or reject sounds that are coming from different directions.
The Amazon page for the Fifine A6T claims
that it is a cardioid pickup pattern microphone.
Is that true?
Well, let's check, shall we?
This green line is sounds coming directly
to the front of the A6T.
And this drop shows that it's rejecting some sounds
that are coming in at 90 degrees
and a little bit more at 180 degrees.
So it is, in fact, a cardioid microphone.
However, for reference,
this is the polar pattern graph of the Electrovoice RE20,
which has better rejection,
particularly at higher frequencies.
So from our evaluation,
the Fifine isn't the best thing around,
but especially for the price,
it's a pretty Fi-fine.
Or at least our unit is, out of the box.
While Amazon reviews tend to get gunked up with spam,
they can also be a way to glean useful,
longer-term information about a product.
So let's see what you guys liked
and what you didn't like about the A6T.
The five-star reviews, for the most part,
rave about the sound quality,
with some claiming that this mic
has exceeded their expectations
and others calling it the best budget mic they've ever used.
For the price, I actually think
this is reasonably fair praise.
The four-star reviews mostly complain about things
that are not related to the sound quality directly,
the clamp feeling cheap, the gain knob being finicky,
or worst of all, the lack of RGB customization.
Again, though, no complaints about audio quality,
so it seems like it's not just ours.
This thing sounds pretty darn good.
Of course, things take a turn for the worse
when we look at the three, two, and one-star reviews,
with many people reporting
the better-than-expected quality turned into zero quality
due to their unit lasting a few weeks
or a few months at best.
There aren't too many of them,
but this is a significant red flag,
and so is the almost complete lack of discussion
about customer service.
Two reviews said it was great,
and one claimed that they did not receive a response
after a week.
It's not a lot of money, considering the package,
but it is your money,
so the choice is yours.
Do you go with a reputable brand
for a significant upcharge,
or do you buy something that costs half as much
knowing that, well,
Like, why is everybody buying this monitor?
Spoiler alert, because it's a great value.