greetings earthlings I'm back with another USB mic review for you guys so today I'm reviewing
this guy the Razer X USB microphone if you are interested in this microphone it'll set you back
around a hundred bucks on Amazon as per usual links in the description and for the majority
of this video I have the mic connected directly to my Mac with my input gain set at around 40%
I'm not gonna do any EQ any compression or any post-processing but I may boost the audio and
post so check the doobly-doo for that information now let's talk about what comes in the box you're
obviously going to get the microphone you get this little stand extender thing you get a desktop
stand you get a USB cable and of course you get some documentation and this is how it looks
when it's all put together as far as the build quality it's not up to my standards for what I
would expect a $100 microphone to feel like it has a plastic body a metal grille and it is a bit on
the light side on the front of the microphone you'll find a headphone volume control if you
want to adjust the microphones gain you'll need to adjust that in your computer's audio preferences
and directly beneath that you'll find a microphone mute button that is green when the microphone is
on or red when the microphone is muted as you move around the outside of the microphone you
will find absolutely nothing else and then on the bottom you'll find a port to connect it to
your computer as well as a three-and-a-half millimeter headphone jack which does offer
latency free monitoring but I do want to note that the latency free monitoring is insanely
quiet so if you want to hear the microphone as well as your computer's playback you'll have
to manually adjust your game audio or your music audio and keep it at around 10 or 15% and it does
have five eighths inch threading on the bottom I threw a 5/8 to 3/8 inch adapter in there to attach
it to my boom arm as far as the specifications this thing has a super cardioid polar pattern a
frequency response of 20 Hertz to 20 kilohertz a sensitivity of approximately negative 35 decibels
a max SPL of 110 decibels a bit depth of 16-bit a sampling rate of up to 48 kilohertz and here
I'll just throw up the headphone output specs in case you're interested in that now I'm spinning
around the microphone to determine what the actual polar pattern is and how the audio changes as you
move around the microphones capsule and since this is a gaming microphone now I'm banging on
a keyboard with cherry MX blues directly behind the microphone to see how much of my voice first
how much of the keyboard it picks up now I'm less than an inch away from the microphone to
see what kind of proximity effect you're able to get out of this thing now I'm about a foot
away from the razor about two feet away from the razor now I've connected the microphone to
the provided desktop stand set it on my desk about a foot away and pointed it at my mouth
I have had to increase my gain to about 70% to get decent levels out of it and this is how the
microphone is sounding now I have the razor X connected directly to a Windows 10 PC with
my input gain set at 50% and this is how the microphone sounds just plug and play without
downloading any drivers alright so as you can see my input gain is set at around 40% I'll drop this
to zero and slowly increase it so you can hear the noise generated by the razor X's preamps
25%
fifty percent
75%
and 100%
did razor make a good mic I guess we'll have to wait and see just to drive home how this
microphone sounds right out of the box for this entire outro I will have it set on the desktop
stand about a foot away from my mouth so as far as the pros for this microphone it does sound
perfectly usable for gaming if it's thrown on a boom arm it also has a relatively small
form-factor compared to other microphones used for gaming like the blue yeti or the regular
razor siren and I also like that they at least attempted to add latency free monitoring to this
mic but then we get to the cons and for $100 I don't think it should be a plastic build quality
the low latency monitoring was insanely low volume compared to the computer playback when we got into
the higher gain settings there was this digital tapping interference which just always bothers me
to find on a USB microphone for a super cardioid polar pattern it picked up a surprising amount of
reverb from my room and for the sake of getting nitpicky it was just kind of difficult to attach
the cable when the microphone was attached to the stand there's just not enough clearance there so
what do I actually think about this thing I mean for gaming I guess it's perfectly fine but do I
think it's worth it for $100 probably not there are plenty of other USB microphones that are sub
100 dollars that sound just as good if not better the only difference is it won't look as cool and
it won't be branded as Razer and I want to throw a disclaimer here if you buy this microphone or
any other microphone for gaming pick up a boom arm because that will help isolate the microphone from
the shocks from your keyboard or your mouse and it will also get the microphone much closer to your
mouth and get you better audio quality so when it comes down to it it's really up to you if you want
to spend a hundred dollars on the razer siren X when you could go out and buy something like
the samson q2u or the blue snowball along with a boom arm for around 60 or 75 bucks and I'm just
gonna leave it there alright guys well I guess that's gonna do it for today if you found this
video full and interesting your helpful go ahead and give me a thumbs up if you thought it sucked
thumbs down if you want to influence the gear that I review next head over to geeks rising comm slash
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the disk or server link in the description and I will see you all later thanks for watching bye