greetings earthlings and welcome to a casual friday video a video where i don't really put
in much work and i just wing it and hopefully have a little bit of fun a very common question i get
is are xlr to usb cables worth it should i buy it does it work with this microphone and i did
answer this maybe five years ago but i figured let's revisit it so i went ahead and bought
the highest rated xlr to usb cable available on amazon and that cable is the host song and usb
mail to xlr female mic link converter cable studio audio cable connector cords adapter
for microphone for recording the overall amazon rating is four and a half stars with 2 237 ratings
and normally this cable costs 19 i guess let's talk about what comes in the bag or something but
it's not much comes with the cable the this little cable tie and a quick start guide or spec sheet or
something then i guess let's talk about the build quality on one end you have the xlr port the other
end you have a very cheap feeling plastic usb plug you have this little indicator light that blinks
the entire time that it's plugged in which is maddening one interesting thing they do have one
of those ferrite beads or ferrite chokes on the cable to hopefully help and reduce interference
but overall not a very good feeling product but it is 20 bucks then as far as the specs it records 16
bit 44 1 or 48 kilohertz it lists the impedance at 1 milliohm a dynamic range of 80 decibels a ration
of 83 db and a signal boost gain of plus 20 tp i don't know what most of that means because i don't
trust it up until now you've been hearing the sm-7b running directly over this cable into my mac
my gain is set at 100 percent and we're barely eking out a level here i'm guessing i'll have
to boost it plus 20 maybe plus 25 decibels in post but this is kind of a worst case scenario because
it's one of the quietest dynamic mics so let's try a hotter output dynamic mic all right now we are
on the sc electronics sev7 a microphone a dynamic microphone that has a significantly hotter output
the gain is still set at 100 percent and we are hitting a much better level around
negative 18 to negative 12 decibels and i will go ahead and be quiet so you can hear the noise
this is kind of a best case scenario for a dynamic because
this has a very healthy output so this would be the lowest noise you would probably
expect out of this connection method this cable so i'll shut up so you can hear that
now before i plug in any of these condenser microphones i'm going to measure the voltage that
is output by this cable and here on the screen is me holding up a multimeter or a multimeter we're
getting a solid 3 volts which is very unusual for these cables typically you get sub 1 volt so
it doesn't work with anything that requires any voltage so there you go 3 volts and because we
are getting a voltage when i have connected the nw 700 which is what i have just done
you can actually hear something you are getting some signal here because this is an electric
condenser microphone that requires around four and a half volts to function at its best yet here we
are with three volts so it's sub-optimal but it is still technically functioning gain is still at 100
and i'm hitting around the same level as i did with the sev7 so really not a good output
let me go ahead and try a few more condensers just to demonstrate that it doesn't work
now on the amazon listing they do state that if you want to use a condenser microphone you need
to have a standalone phantom power supply i don't have any of those phantom power supplies anymore
i have misplaced them or they're hidden under some kind of stack of crappy xlr cables that came with
the neewer nw 700 kit so i don't have one of those i'm not going to give up there so we are going to
commit some utter blasphemy here and we're going to do something before i describe what's happening
i need to apologize to lewitt i am sorry for this and i need to ask the austrian government not to
execute me because that may be a justifiable response to this currently i have the luit
lct 840 which is a one thousand dollar tube condenser microphone that is running into
the luit power supply for this microphone it has been warming up for about an hour then i'm running
the xlr output from that power supply over the hosting on xlr to usb cable into my mac 16 bit 48
kilohertz and my gain is set at 50 percent so finally we were able to decrease the gain
below 100 percent which is what it was set on for the sev7 the neewer nw 700 and of course
the sm7b so there you go that's that's a stupid test that nobody will be buying this cable for
just for the sake of doing it i guess so what's the conclusion to this video i simply don't
think it's worth it they say if you want to use a condenser microphone you need a standalone phantom
power supply those go for twenty to thirty dollars on amazon and then the cable costs twenty dollars
so they're saying you need to spend forty to fifty dollars to get it to work with
any condenser microphone including getting the best out of something like the nw 700
and i know that seems like an incredibly low price point at forty to fifty dollars because
it is fifty bucks to start recording is crazy low but at that price point there are much better
options like the behringer um2 or the m audio m track solo both of which sit around 45 to 50 bucks
and even recently the behringer um2 was on sale for 19.99 if you got that sale then you made out
like a bandit so even though i know how appealing it is to jump on amazon see a 20 cable and think
that that is the entire recording solution and you're gonna get out with only 20 bucks spent
10 out of 10 times i would recommend saving up and getting something like the m audio m track
or the behringer m2 because it's going to treat you a lot better has better features
better performance better everything and that is it for this casual friday video thank you so much
for watching if you found this fun interesting or helpful going to give me a thumbs up hated it big
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go ahead and subscribe and i will talk to you on another day bye bye