3 Tips Sound Recording & Sound Testing for Behringer C1 and Audio Technica ATR2500x Condenser Microphone

Sound quality is one of the important factors in video creation or content creation. I am not an expert but I am trying my best to learn and record good sound in my video. I did purchase a few types of microphones to test them in different environments and different machines. 

As you can see that in order to record a good sound quality, there are basically 3 main factors that we need to focus on.

1. Input

Basically is your microphone and the recording device. You can use an external microphone and plug it into your desktop/laptop/audio interface/smartphone to do the recording. Thus, if you use a cheap microphone and plug it into a high-end audio interface, I don't think it will work and vice versa. Especially when we use USB powered microphone or wireless microphone with a 2.4 GHz frequency, we might get some electronic buzz recorded. This can be easily solved with money. As long as you have the budget, you can find a value for money microphone that suits your needs.

2. Environment

This is another big factor to take note of so that we can control the sound quality. For example, I bought a great microphone (Input) and my environment is noisy (ceiling fan spinning, air conditioner blowing, toilet flushing, other people screaming, children running, neighbour doing a renovation, typing keyboard, etc) and the list can go on. It drives you crazy.

On top of that, if your environment is like me with 4 walls and no furniture, then we got to deal with voice echo.

This factor can not be solved with money. But, you still can solve it if you plan to make a minor renovation to your room such as putting soundproof board and adding furniture. I will assume that require more budget compare to No.1

3. Output

This is more toward sound editing such as normalisation, gain, noise reduction, etc. There might be a few simple hacks on creating good sound with a cheap microphone on YouTube. But I am not convinced because I have a different recording input and environment. Therefore, when I follow the simple hacks from the internet, it produces a different result. In the beginning, everything is not equal.

Today I am going to a test on 2 different dynamic microphones with different setups. I am going to compare UM-1 with the audio interface U-Phoria UM2 vs Audio Technica ATR 2500x.

Here is a sample of Audio Technica ATR2500x with no filter and no edit recorded directly using Audacity.

ATR2500x Audio File

Here is a sample of UM-1 plugged into U-Horia UM2 with 50% gain, no filter and no edit recorded directly using Audacity.

C1 + UM2 Audio File