whether it's to hang out with your paid friends on Discord or to fulfill your
lifelong dream of becoming a millionaire who works 16 hours a day and lives in
squalor for some reason you have found yourself in need of a microphone
but in a sea of many great options why
the ever-loving Jack eating are you guys all buying this one it's not the
cheapest it's not the best quality probably and while I have encountered
the brand before fifine isn't exactly a household name
and yet somehow it was the Amazon bestseller way back in January and now
over six months later it Remains the top
dog do you all know something that I don't not for long you won't with the
help of the Labs team I will be finding out if you made a big mistake or if
everyone else is missing out on the best bang for the buck I know one thing
you're all missing out on though our sponsor the ridge life's complicated so
simplify it with a ridge wallet with a slim design to carry your essential
cards and cash without the weight or bulk of that thing currently in your
pocket follow the link below and use code Linus to save 10 off your purchase
and get free shipping I guess the first question is why not the fifine a6t it's
47 at the time of writing has overwhelmingly positive reviews works on
PC Mac and PlayStation and it includes
absolutely everything you need to get started the mic itself a boom ARM a desk
clamp a shock mount and even a little
pop filter with a smiley face on it I mean it's kind of an incredible value a
setup like this purchased all pieces separately could easily run you double
or more and I'm not even talking about a
more advanced setup with a separate XLR microphone and audio interface
are they doing all of this it's kind of a wild right because fundamentally every
microphone from the very cheapest all the way to the most premium is the same
in that it captures the sound that's coming to it via vibrations in the air
and then outputs that as a mic level signal which is basically an audible you
then need a pre-amplifier to convert it to a line level signal that humans can
actually hear and finally you need an analog to digital converter to convert
the waves of analog data into digital data that your computer can understand
and yes all of that is packed into the
devices in your setup whether you can point to the discrete components or not
the difference is that in fully Integrated Solutions they just might be
really really tiny and or well really
really cheap which raises a huge question here I mean if you can make all
the necessary pieces so small and so affordable why does anybody spend the
extra on these Overkill setups like this
one well the most obvious answer is of
course quality compared to our studio mic which is the one I'm talking on
right now or the one that we use for the
land show the a6t um
it just doesn't sound that great by comparison but we're also being totally
unfair I mean considering that the mic itself is practically thrown in for free
alongside its generous accessory package means that I think a more reasonable
comparison would be to a pair of old wired earpods that you had lying around
which as expected it sounds a lot worse
we're going to get into some deeper performance comparisons a bit later but
first I want to talk about the second advantage of a more advanced XLR setup
and that's upgradability it can be a
bigger upfront investment that is unless you choose a mic that has both USB and
XLR but what's nice about it is that you're able to swap out only your
microphone or only your audio interface if you end up needing something else of
course for some folks the sheer Simplicity of having a single USBC cable
trumps any kind of quality or future proofing Advantage so let's take a
closer look look at the a16 the mic
feels quite a bit cheaper than it looks in the pictures actually it's shockingly
light it's side address which means you talk into it like this not like this and
to help you with that the pop filter only attaches to it one way so you're
very unlikely to mess it up and the boom ARM does actually a pretty darn
excellent job of keeping the mic exactly where you put it but is so light that it
seems like it could break it pretty much any time and one more thing while it is
nice that these cable ties are included I feel like an upgrade to some better
ones from lttstore.com is in order with
that said there's no other way around it I Gotta Give Them full marks for ease of
setup I mean you don't even need an app you just plug it in and the RGB lights
up to let you know that you are officially a Pro Gamer
forever that's right you cannot customize the
RGB or even turn it off unless
you mute the microphone all together gain is adjusted with this big old knob
on the bottom but the indicator is inconveniently positioned on the bottom
and it doesn't actually correspond to the position of the dial so maybe it
would be better to just use software to tell you nothing no the volume slider on
Windows does nothing with the default drivers for the five fine and the lack
of an app means that there are no other drivers nor is there an official way to
add VST plugins Like A Noise Gate or a compressor and also no audio mixing like
some other microphones allow you to do however you'll know that this isn't a
huge Mark against it if you watched our recent video highlighting some handy
audio tools that can take care of that for you none of which matters at all if
the mic's performance is unacceptably bad so we're going to start by letting
you guys judge some fairly challenging scenarios I'm just gonna you know what
I'm just going to put it right here and we're going to let the five finds
included shock mount see if it can handle some desk vibrations and stuff
like that or oh how about the pop filter um pop pop popsicle plosive uh or ice
ice icicle baby oh oh how does it handle
gamer excitement uh POG POG POG uh gamer
say POG right I'm gonna which way is down oh bloody oh I don't know which way
is down it doesn't matter for comparison the Blue Yeti costs about twice as much
with no accessories other than a desk stand and sounds about like this and
just so you don't have to rewind to find it um
and just so you don't have to rewind to find it here's what you'd usually hear
on the WAN Show and now we're back on the fifine a6t one last time for your
enjoyment or lack thereof but for my part I actually think it sounds pretty
darn okay but then again we didn't hire
a Labs team so I could give you my YouTuber thoughts TM time for some
science we haven't actually finalized our test Suite or begun testing Mike's
insignificant volumes yet so what we did was choose a handful of models that we
felt were either comparable due to their price and popularity or because they
might help provide a reference point for how our a6t performs compared to a
bottom or a top tier solution our reference mic is a Dayton audio emm6
which is a calibrated omnidirectional microphone compared to other USB mics
the a6t performs actually surprisingly similarly in frequency response but the
drop in this range suggests that it will have a slightly darker sound the Elgato
wave ended up being the outlier the other way sounding brighter though that
did come at the cost of picking up a little bit more sibilance which is your
harsh s and sounds overall though the
field was close enough that if you're considering a USB microphone we just
didn't really find there to be a huge difference in performance from the worst
to the best and believe it or not we
kind of see the same thing when we compare it even to higher end XLR
microphones compared to an Electro Voice re20 a mic that costs literally 10 times
as much as this entire complete solution
the on paper results are shockingly
close and in the real world the re20 is
better but it's certainly not 10 times
better however that is under somewhat
ideal conditions better microphones can have advantages that go beyond frequency
response like for example background noise rejection if you're alone in a
room hanging out with your friends on Discord you do not need a 450 mic this
is great with that said there are cases where frequency response does tell a big
part of the story our third gen airpods
for example really struggled at the high end possibly because of their Bluetooth
connectivity or noise cancellation but in practice they sound overall not bad
but then our wired earpods have a hole
right in the vocal range that really does make them sound kinda muffled and
you can improve this situation by clipping the mic a little closer to your
mouth but at the the end of the day the mic is still omnidirectional so
regardless of its frequency response or its proximity to the source it's going
to pick up any noise around you including your keyboard your mouse or
your mom yelling at you to get off the darn computer now unfortunately we're
not set up yet to test every aspect of a microphone's performance once the lab's
website is fully up and running and we've got our Sound Chamber you're going to see all kinds of really great stuff
but not yet but we're also not done yet for today
let's talk about polar patterns have you ever noticed these small symbols on some
microphones that is how well the microphone captures or reject sounds
that are coming from different directions the Amazon page for the fifine a6t
claims that it is a cardioid pickup pattern microphone is that true well
let's check shall we this green line is sounds coming
directly to the front of the a6t and this drop shows that it's rejecting some
sounds that are coming in at 90 degrees and a little bit more at 180 degrees so
it is in fact a cardioid microphone
however for reference this is the polar pattern graph of the electrovoice re20
which has better rejection particularly at higher frequencies
so from our evaluation the fifine isn't
the best thing around but especially for the price it's a a pretty fine
or at least our unit is out of the box while Amazon reviews tend
to get gunked up with Spam they can also be a way to glean useful longer term
information about a product so let's see what you guys liked and what you didn't
like about the a6t 5 Star reviews for the most part Rave
about the sound quality with some claiming that this mic has exceeded
their expectations and others calling it the best budget mic they've ever used
for the price I actually think this is reasonably Fair praise the four star
reviews mostly complain about things that are not related to the sound
quality directly the plant feeling cheap the gain knob being finicky or worst of
all the lack of RGB customization again
though no complaints about audio quality so it seems like it's not just ours this
thing sounds pretty darn good of course things take a turn for the
worse when we look at the three two and one star reviews with many people
reporting the better than expected quality turned into zero quality due to
their unit lasting a few weeks or a few months at best there aren't too many of
them but this is a significant red flag and so is the almost complete lack of
discussion about customer service the reviews said it was great and one
claims that they did not receive a response after a week
it's not a lot of money considering the package but it is your money so the
choice is yours do you go with a reputable brand for a significant up
charge or do you buy something that costs half as much knowing that well you
might need to get another one shipped to you check out one of the other ones from
the series like why is everybody buying this monitor spoiler alert because it's
a great value but there's more to it than that