USB microphone cables are used to turn a regular XLR microphone into a USB microphone that
can be connected to your computer.
In this video, we’ll cover how to use a USB microphone cable and do a test of the
audio quality from one of them.
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So let’s start by looking at the packaging of this microphone cable before we go and
unbox it.
Around the packaging, we’ll see a little bit of text, but there’s some grammatical
issues that kind of sketch me out about this product.
It also says it’s compatible with Windows 7.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been using Windows 10 for about 5 years now.
For them to not have tested this product or even just updated the packaging is an issue
for me.
When we open the box, we get a USB microphone cable inside and a piece of paper with some
instructions, and information on it.
We have info that this is a 44.1 kHz 16-bit analog to digital cable and it’s 20 feet
long.
Let’s talk about the microphones that can be used with this.
Since this cable cannot provide phantom power, it can only work with a dynamic microphone.
That’s something like this Shure SM58 that I’m using.
You can get a condenser microphone to work, but by that point you would need a phantom
power supply or preamp, plus an additional XLR cable to connect it all.
At that point, it’s way cheaper to just buy a simple and cheap audio interface, and
you’ll get much better quality audio results from that, as well as other features like
an instrument input and headphone output.
As an example of this, we’ll compare the USB microphone cable in this review to a Behringer
U-PHORIA UM2 audio interface.
To get everything connect and working, we just plug one end of the cable into the microphone
and the other into a USB port.
Then, the computer will automatically detect it as a microphone input.
To get it to work in a digital audio workstation, we need to install ASIO4ALL as the driver,
enable that as the audio driver, and open the configuration to set the audio input as
the USB microphone cable.
From there, we can record a track with it.
For more details on using ASIO4ALL as the audio driver, check out our other video where
we did a full tutorial on it.
Now let’s take a listen to the audio quality from this USB cable.
“This is a test of the USB microphone cable with the Shure SM58 dynamic microphone.”
The first thing I noticed when I started using this cable is the massive amount of noise
that it creates.
Immediately, I thought this was completely unacceptable for a microphone cable, so it’s
not even something that I would ever be able to use.
Even noise reduction software would have a hard time cleaning something up at this level,
and we shouldn’t be starting our recordings with that much noise anyways.
Something that I can’t demonstrate on video is the amount of latency this also creates,
even though we’re using an ASIO driver.
I would expect very low latency with this driver, so it seems that it could be the cable
itself that’s causing the issue.
For a comparison of what a very cheap audio interface can do, here’s the same microphone
connected to the Behringer UM2 recorded at the same level.
“This is a test of the Behringer UM2 audio interface with a Shure SM58 dynamic microphone.”
With this recording, there’s a lot less noise and I also didn’t have nearly the
same latency issues with it.
Audio interfaces also have the ability to adjust the level of the preamp for the microphone
so you can adjust the level it is recording at.
There is no way to adjust the level of the USB microphone cable.
For me, both the noise and the latency were huge issues so I ended up returning this product,
so I definitely can’t recommend purchasing one.
I was really hoping this microphone cable would turn out to be as good as the USB guitar
cables I’ve used in the past, and those were definitely useable as a way to connect
an electric guitar to an amp simulator on the computer.
This unfortunately had way too many issues with it for it to be a good product.
Thanks for checking out this video on USB microphone cables.
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