I have a long history with the struggle of finding a decent mic for my keyboard sound tests.
I wanted to find a microphone with a good signal-to-noise ratio - and possibly not paying hundreds of dollars for it. 🙂
My first mic was a HyperX Quadcast, which I found better for podcasting rather than asmr/sound tests.
So I changed to a Rode VideoMicro - in spite of its 'budget' category the quality is considerably good.
But I still wanted to upgrade a bit, as the noise was still disturbing.

So here you can find my final competitors for the only mic place on my table:
@rodemic Videomicro
@maonoglobal PD200X
@fifinemicrophone A8

I was surprised by the result, as I heard only good experiences about the A8. But the PD200X seems to work with much less background noise - which I have a lot of - so it's an undeniable win for me.
Also it gives back the closest sound of what I hear in person. 👏

Here are some tech notes for the comparison:
1. No filters/mods have been added to the sounds
2. The knob/software options for setting the 'volume' of the mics are purely volume knobs (not gain controls) - but I couldn't find any product info on these, so it's just my hunch
3. Normalized volume: I want my sound to reach a certain volume level. So I post-adjusted all 3 sound files in Adobe Premiere Pro to the same volume level.
4. After some research I found that using an XLR cable over a USB cable has no added value to me as I have no Audio Mixer in my setup. Soundwise as well (I prefer digital signal over analog anytime. No potential environmental noise in digital.)

#maono #pd200x #rode #videomicro #fifine #fifinea8