Samson UB1 - Defective mic or has someone fiddled with it.

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Kumagoro

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I have just bought a SAMSON UB1 omni directional usb mic from ebay and am very disappointed with the quality. Even up close, for example 5cm, it is still very quiet even with the level set to 100% in windows and at 35cm it is barely audible even with the speaker volume on full whack. Without the cover on its a bit better but to hear it 1.5M I have to amplify it by 30db and of course the noise is terrible.

Having popped it open I thought the mic looked a bit on the crap side and it looks a lot like this rapidonline.com/Audio-Visual/Electret-microphone-30212
It also had T.S stamped into it. What do these mics usually look like in reasonably decent microphones? I can find no teardowns which show the actual mics.

I have found someone say the following about the UB1 which is of course not my experience at all.

The UB1 is extremely clear when 0.5-1.5 metres in front of it and audible from 3-4 metres away (opposite side of a lecture theatre).

The mic is glued to the base and it has a rubber strap holding it in also the screws have glue on them like some kind of tampering detection. Does it come like that from the factory or did someone replace the mic and do it??? There was no trace of any warrant void sticker either.


Also in order to test it I played back some high frequency tones on my PC speakers (admittedly not great) and it didnt seem to pick up anything about 16.5KHz. I could physically here the 17KHz coming from the speakers which it didnt pick up. Apparently it is rated for 30HZ to 18KHz which was stated on another site ndeva.co.uk/samson-ub1-usb-boundary-microphone.html

So is it just defective or has someone changed the mic? Not there appears to be no bad caps or any water damage. Ideally I would like to know what the mics look like in samson or other makes.
 
usb mics are for podcasting and are not high quality to begin with.
They are not really suggested for decent music recording.

(A $99 usb mic is really a $40 mic and a $40 interface in one package.)

Sell it and get an asio usb interface music interface and an XLR mic and you'll be ahead.
 
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