miniDSP UMIK-1 USB Measurement Calibrated Microphone

I bought an Emotiva XMC-1 Processor about 7 months ago. Amongst that I have an svs ultra tower 7.1 surround system and an svspb4000 sub. Nice setup or so I thought. The mic that came with the from emotiva would give too many varying results and too many disappointing playback results especially way too light in the sub area almost every time. I decided to try the ECM8000 from Behringer becuz it was cheaper @ $55 instead of UMIK-1@ $100. The ECM800 $55, driver $45, phantom power $25 and last but not least hdmi $8 total of $133 dollars. The ecm8000 did a flat response, but again the sub was too lean until I went into Dirac and changed the sub settings which didn't sound the best. Not bad though. I was not happy with dirac so far. I could send all the extra sh#$t for the ecm8000 back except the mic. If anyone has an emotiva $2500 processor or higher price. Get the umik-1. The emotiva mic was way too sensitive so when it runs dirac it wants to turn the sub way lean. Tweaking it every calibration gets old but , I could get it humpin. Now the UMIK-1 was a whole new ball game. First calibration made adjustments to dirac. Im just used to do n that. Played some movies and music sounded good but, I wanted to play more. Went to dirac omg my file didn't save. 2 nights later I ran dirac again with the umik-1....same results again. I decided not to touch the sub section this time and just give a whirl Wow..what a world of a whirl it turned out to be. This mic is less sensitive so there for it needs the subs to be present and it is very much present. It picks up down to 8hz or so. It sounds like a real movie theater now. I missed all of this thunder and over all detail for what!!! Minidsp offers other sound correction programs and how to set up guides. I think it's a very nice touch for " just buying" their mic.

Mic is great. Used it to tune my sound system with a reference program. Worked well. Sound system sounded 100% better after using it. Highly recommend quality microphone.

Loving my purchase of the umik-1. It has definitely made a huge difference in the quality of my Atmos system. It's seems more accurate than the puck mic that came with my AVR. Objectively can feel a difference in how my 7.4.4 system sounds.

I bought this microphone to use it for room correction. I love the fact that the company calibrates each individual microphone and create a file to use. I finally used it today and it worked like a charm. You should know that it has a USB C connection, and so you need to be able to use the right cable with it. I’m very happy I bought it.

I bought this to use with the free software package Room EQ Wizard. I used it to measure the acoustics of a recording studio in order to plan and build acoustic treatments (low frequency bass traps) - mostly to find the peaks and nulls in frequency response related to room geometry modal resonances - so that I could correctly target the design of the bass traps to the right frequencies. It worked great, and told me what frequencies I needed to target (which incidentally were the same frequencies I had predicted given the axial modes arising from on the room geometry). It sets up easily, the microphone is recognized by Room EQ Wizard, and allows you to use the included calibration file based on the microphone serial number. The room test takes all of about one minute. Make sure to use the best speakers you have for low frequency response because those speakers need to be able to generate audible sound way down to the lower end of the frequency range (I used a sub-woofer). Once you get the acoustic treatments built and installed, you can run the test again to see how successful your efforts at acoustic treatment were.

Sturdy product with amazing packaging

I’ve been using the UMIK-1 for years now. After five years of consistent use the first one went bad. This was my replacement for the exact same model. There is no single perfect measurement microphone. I supplement with a second microphones to ease speaker development; however, for room acoustics and finalized speaker measurements in general, this microphone is all you’ll ever need to validate acoustics. I utilize a more complex microphone, DAC, and amplifier combination to find speaker-driver offsets only during any speaker design phase. These driver offsets “can” be calculated using the UMIK and some careful calculations, but cannot automatically be accounted for with a single microphone/DAC combo. I’m lazy and have my adapted process; however, I have, and still can do a complete design with the UMIK only. UMIK’s plug and play connection with related measurements software is simply impressive. Although there’s a large learning curve regarding software tools like REW to become proficient with usage, this microphone makes it as simple stupid as any microphone could. Software developers are always working hard in the background to improve the software to make the mic more useful yet. For the price of the UMIK -1 you can’t go wrong for what it does. Great mic!

Excellent USB microphone using Dirac Live software to calibrate my home theater’s Dolby Atmos Bowers and Wilkins speaker system! Highly Recommend!