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whether it's to hang out with your paid friends on Discord or to fulfill your

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lifelong dream of becoming a millionaire who works 16 hours a day and lives in

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squalor for some reason you have found yourself in need of a microphone

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but in a sea of many great options why

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the ever-loving Jack eating are you guys all buying this one it's not the

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cheapest it's not the best quality probably and while I have encountered

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the brand before fifine isn't exactly a household name

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and yet somehow it was the Amazon bestseller way back in January and now

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over six months later it Remains the top

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dog do you all know something that I don't not for long you won't with the

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help of the Labs team I will be finding out if you made a big mistake or if

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everyone else is missing out on the best bang for the buck I know one thing

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pocket follow the link below and use code Linus to save 10 off your purchase

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and get free shipping I guess the first question is why not the fifine a6t it's

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47 at the time of writing has overwhelmingly positive reviews works on

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PC Mac and PlayStation and it includes

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absolutely everything you need to get started the mic itself a boom ARM a desk

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clamp a shock mount and even a little

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pop filter with a smiley face on it I mean it's kind of an incredible value a

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setup like this purchased all pieces separately could easily run you double

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or more and I'm not even talking about a

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more advanced setup with a separate XLR microphone and audio interface

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are they doing all of this it's kind of a wild right because fundamentally every

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microphone from the very cheapest all the way to the most premium is the same

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in that it captures the sound that's coming to it via vibrations in the air

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and then outputs that as a mic level signal which is basically an audible you

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then need a pre-amplifier to convert it to a line level signal that humans can

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actually hear and finally you need an analog to digital converter to convert

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the waves of analog data into digital data that your computer can understand

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and yes all of that is packed into the

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devices in your setup whether you can point to the discrete components or not

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the difference is that in fully Integrated Solutions they just might be

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really really tiny and or well really

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really cheap which raises a huge question here I mean if you can make all

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the necessary pieces so small and so affordable why does anybody spend the

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extra on these Overkill setups like this

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one well the most obvious answer is of

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course quality compared to our studio mic which is the one I'm talking on

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right now or the one that we use for the

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land show the a6t um

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it just doesn't sound that great by comparison but we're also being totally

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unfair I mean considering that the mic itself is practically thrown in for free

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alongside its generous accessory package means that I think a more reasonable

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comparison would be to a pair of old wired earpods that you had lying around

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which as expected it sounds a lot worse

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we're going to get into some deeper performance comparisons a bit later but

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first I want to talk about the second advantage of a more advanced XLR setup

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and that's upgradability it can be a

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bigger upfront investment that is unless you choose a mic that has both USB and

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XLR but what's nice about it is that you're able to swap out only your

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microphone or only your audio interface if you end up needing something else of

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course for some folks the sheer Simplicity of having a single USBC cable

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trumps any kind of quality or future proofing Advantage so let's take a

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closer look look at the a16 the mic

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feels quite a bit cheaper than it looks in the pictures actually it's shockingly

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light it's side address which means you talk into it like this not like this and

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to help you with that the pop filter only attaches to it one way so you're

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very unlikely to mess it up and the boom ARM does actually a pretty darn

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excellent job of keeping the mic exactly where you put it but is so light that it

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seems like it could break it pretty much any time and one more thing while it is

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nice that these cable ties are included I feel like an upgrade to some better

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ones from lttstore.com is in order with

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that said there's no other way around it I Gotta Give Them full marks for ease of

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setup I mean you don't even need an app you just plug it in and the RGB lights

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up to let you know that you are officially a Pro Gamer

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forever that's right you cannot customize the

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RGB or even turn it off unless

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you mute the microphone all together gain is adjusted with this big old knob

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on the bottom but the indicator is inconveniently positioned on the bottom

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and it doesn't actually correspond to the position of the dial so maybe it

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would be better to just use software to tell you nothing no the volume slider on

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Windows does nothing with the default drivers for the five fine and the lack

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of an app means that there are no other drivers nor is there an official way to

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add VST plugins Like A Noise Gate or a compressor and also no audio mixing like

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some other microphones allow you to do however you'll know that this isn't a

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huge Mark against it if you watched our recent video highlighting some handy

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audio tools that can take care of that for you none of which matters at all if

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the mic's performance is unacceptably bad so we're going to start by letting

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you guys judge some fairly challenging scenarios I'm just gonna you know what

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I'm just going to put it right here and we're going to let the five finds

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included shock mount see if it can handle some desk vibrations and stuff

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like that or oh how about the pop filter um pop pop popsicle plosive uh or ice

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ice icicle baby oh oh how does it handle

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gamer excitement uh POG POG POG uh gamer

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say POG right I'm gonna which way is down oh bloody oh I don't know which way

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is down it doesn't matter for comparison the Blue Yeti costs about twice as much

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with no accessories other than a desk stand and sounds about like this and

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just so you don't have to rewind to find it um

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and just so you don't have to rewind to find it here's what you'd usually hear

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on the WAN Show and now we're back on the fifine a6t one last time for your

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enjoyment or lack thereof but for my part I actually think it sounds pretty

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darn okay but then again we didn't hire

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a Labs team so I could give you my YouTuber thoughts TM time for some

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science we haven't actually finalized our test Suite or begun testing Mike's

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insignificant volumes yet so what we did was choose a handful of models that we

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felt were either comparable due to their price and popularity or because they

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might help provide a reference point for how our a6t performs compared to a

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bottom or a top tier solution our reference mic is a Dayton audio emm6

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which is a calibrated omnidirectional microphone compared to other USB mics

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the a6t performs actually surprisingly similarly in frequency response but the

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drop in this range suggests that it will have a slightly darker sound the Elgato

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wave ended up being the outlier the other way sounding brighter though that

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did come at the cost of picking up a little bit more sibilance which is your

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harsh s and sounds overall though the

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field was close enough that if you're considering a USB microphone we just

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didn't really find there to be a huge difference in performance from the worst

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to the best and believe it or not we

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kind of see the same thing when we compare it even to higher end XLR

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microphones compared to an Electro Voice re20 a mic that costs literally 10 times

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as much as this entire complete solution

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the on paper results are shockingly

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close and in the real world the re20 is

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better but it's certainly not 10 times

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better however that is under somewhat

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ideal conditions better microphones can have advantages that go beyond frequency

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response like for example background noise rejection if you're alone in a

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room hanging out with your friends on Discord you do not need a 450 mic this

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is great with that said there are cases where frequency response does tell a big

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part of the story our third gen airpods

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for example really struggled at the high end possibly because of their Bluetooth

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connectivity or noise cancellation but in practice they sound overall not bad

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but then our wired earpods have a hole

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right in the vocal range that really does make them sound kinda muffled and

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you can improve this situation by clipping the mic a little closer to your

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mouth but at the the end of the day the mic is still omnidirectional so

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regardless of its frequency response or its proximity to the source it's going

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to pick up any noise around you including your keyboard your mouse or

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your mom yelling at you to get off the darn computer now unfortunately we're

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not set up yet to test every aspect of a microphone's performance once the lab's

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website is fully up and running and we've got our Sound Chamber you're going to see all kinds of really great stuff

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but not yet but we're also not done yet for today

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let's talk about polar patterns have you ever noticed these small symbols on some

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microphones that is how well the microphone captures or reject sounds

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that are coming from different directions the Amazon page for the fifine a6t

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claims that it is a cardioid pickup pattern microphone is that true well

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let's check shall we this green line is sounds coming

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directly to the front of the a6t and this drop shows that it's rejecting some

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sounds that are coming in at 90 degrees and a little bit more at 180 degrees so

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it is in fact a cardioid microphone

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however for reference this is the polar pattern graph of the electrovoice re20

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which has better rejection particularly at higher frequencies

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so from our evaluation the fifine isn't

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the best thing around but especially for the price it's a a pretty fine

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or at least our unit is out of the box while Amazon reviews tend

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to get gunked up with Spam they can also be a way to glean useful longer term

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information about a product so let's see what you guys liked and what you didn't

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like about the a6t 5 Star reviews for the most part Rave

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about the sound quality with some claiming that this mic has exceeded

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their expectations and others calling it the best budget mic they've ever used

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for the price I actually think this is reasonably Fair praise the four star

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reviews mostly complain about things that are not related to the sound

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quality directly the plant feeling cheap the gain knob being finicky or worst of

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all the lack of RGB customization again

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though no complaints about audio quality so it seems like it's not just ours this

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thing sounds pretty darn good of course things take a turn for the

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worse when we look at the three two and one star reviews with many people

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reporting the better than expected quality turned into zero quality due to

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their unit lasting a few weeks or a few months at best there aren't too many of

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them but this is a significant red flag and so is the almost complete lack of

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discussion about customer service the reviews said it was great and one

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claims that they did not receive a response after a week

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it's not a lot of money considering the package but it is your money so the

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choice is yours do you go with a reputable brand for a significant up

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charge or do you buy something that costs half as much knowing that well you

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might need to get another one shipped to you check out one of the other ones from

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the series like why is everybody buying this monitor spoiler alert because it's

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a great value but there's more to it than that