Behringer ECM8000

As a calibration microphone, it is an affordable microphone in terms of price performance. but don't expect a microphone-specific calibration file or a document. because these microphones are uniformly fabricated products. there are no special calibration files. Naturally, it does not come with a calibration file. For this reason, do not waste time searching for calibration files on the internet. Because these reports are specific to the microphone. When you add this file to the measurement program, the program analyzes the measurement made with your microphone according to this calibration file. If you have such a more detailed expectation, I would say take a look at the upper segment counterparts. This is the only difference from its more expensive competitors. If we collect it, it will work clearly. Someone who knows his job can do very good measurement and acoustic calibration.

This is useful for small/home studios on a budget that require some examination of room acoustics. I downloaded the trial version of Sonarworks and found this microphone did the job in terms of characterising my space. I could not find an official calibration curve readily available but did find one on a third party website that seemed believable. Perhaps that is a limitation to be expected on a budget (I believe some brands have a specific calibration included) but it seems more than adequate to discern any particular problem frequencies with a given room.

Although fitting several bass traps seemed to make little measurable difference in my room, this microphone was adequate for me to get to know the space for better or worse.

Great microphone for the price. I'm not an audio expert or anything - I bought the mic to record noise from my neighbors as proof. It does the job well enough. I chose measuring omni condenser mic because I wanted the recording to sound as natural as possible - so you can hear the room like if you were there. That's not possible due to low sensitivity but at least it still picks up some background sounds that serve as a comparison to the neighbor's noise and the recorded sound is neutral (you need to fix your headphones with eq though to hear it as neutral - for Android you can use wavelet).

One big issue with this mic is its self-noise. It's too big to be able to record "silence" in the room and it isn't sensitive enough to record reverberations of room sounds (I think that's what is meant when you say "you can hear the silence"). However, for what I need it for it does well. The self-noise is normal for this kind of microphone (measuring), so I read.

This is my first microphone (apart from gaming sets) but the sensitivity seems low. You read everywhere how condenser mics pick *everything*. Well, surprise - they don't or at least not well enough. I paired this microphone with UM2 (cheap product.... I know) and I need to crank up the gain all the way to the max (with recording level at 54 in Windows) to get decent enough volume of the noise in the room. I read online I should have set it up the other way around - windows recording volume at 100 and then increasing gain. According to a review from a youtuber Kraus Behringer um2 has a good gain so if you want to record something silent you may need a different mic.

One small tip, make sure your windows settings match those in the recording software. At first I had default windows settings (16bit, 44100Hz) with 48000Hz in Audacity then over the weeks of usage I stumbled upon the windows settings and changed then to 48000Hz so they both matched. Noise dropped quite a bit. Not of the microphone but overall recording. Much cleaner and smoother sound.