Behringer C-1U Studio Condensor Microphone

These mics get mixed reviews depending on users' expectations. Are these the best mics you'll buy? No. Can you buy better? Absolutely. Are they worth £40? Yes! If I'd spent £200 on these mics I'd have described them as noisy and disappointing, but these are not expensive high quality mics. They are budget mics, and as such they are great. I compared them to an AT835b (shotgun mic, worth much more), and for indoor use found them a good substitute with similar sensitivity. Size is the first thing that hits you, as they're look tiny at just 9.5cm long and 2cm wide. Outdoors, they're not so good as they have poor wind/pop rejection. They do have a little internal hiss if you wind the gain up, but they have a sensitivity of -41dBV, so you shouldn't need crazy amounts of gain, and the specs imply they are good for loud sources (up to an SPL of 140dB at 1kHz, 10dB more with the cut engaged - that's airshow loud). They are a little "toppy" above 10kHz, but you can EQ that out if necessary. I'm not disappointed with these. For the money you get a pair of functional mics, good for drums, guitar amps, crowd mics, and "off axis" speech (so your plosives don't pop the living daylights out of them) for indoor video (eg about 8 inches above and in front of a subject, out of shot).

Whilst I wouldn't say I was a professional music producer, after studying music tech at college I do feel confident in being able to determine whether something is of an acceptable quality for an enthusiast on a budget. I really do think these things are great. Getting two microphones for £45, I wasn't really sure what I was going to receive. Especially when I have used fairly expensive mics (nothing ridiculous costing, mainly mid range rode and shure microphones) at college and further at University. This was exacerbated when I opened the package to find that they are small, I mean really small. They are fairly heavy for their size and feel of nice quality in the hand with the aluminium finish. They come in a 'nice for the price' carry case that seems to be well padded to protect them well enough with all of the accessories and the mics themselves packing up into a small area, great for on the move recordings. Small note about the incidental pairing stand that they come with, I thought (quite possibly stupidly) that the stand would act as a table mount and hold the mics up. Whilst that is the case without xlr's attached, attached it topples over straight away. Not an issue as a stand is better practice anyway but thought id mention it. Having quickly set them up through my alesis io2 audio interface onto cubase I set about recording my acoustic guitar and vocals as well as just general sampling. They sound great, nice and clear free from distortion etc. Really excellent, especially considering the price point. They need a fair amount of gain from my alesis to get a decent signal through to cubase but once that's sorted they record acoustic guitars very well. For such a small diaphragm they do a good job of picking up low end, maybe too much so when it comes to vocals (probably just my untrained boomy voice haha) for my taste. I do plan to try them out recording a brass band and continue to use them as acoustic bedroom mics. Whilst im not going to lie and say these things are big boy killers (they really arent) they will do a brillinat job of semi professional music production, which in the end is exactly what i bought them for, for a fraction of the price of two Audio Technica Mics or other budget options.

Considering the price, they're great mics. I've only used them for drumming so they're blended with much more expensive mics but for the money, these are amazing.

I bought the Behringer Studio Condenser C-1U microphone to improve the quality of my home music recording efforts without going to the expense and complication of adding a pre-amp box. The selling point for me was the USB connection which is powered by phantom power directly from the computer. The mic arrived a month ago (great customer service from Blue Aran) and it has taken me a longish time to achieve acceptable results. The main problem (which I discovered is not unique to me) is that the mic is on the quiet side. To produce the flat, quality sound I was hoping for requires all relevant computer settings to be turned up to the maximum. In the course of doing so, I ran into problems with my Realtek Audio Manager. It is quite possible that the resulting glitches are due to my particular system components, but the fact remains that for me it was not quite the "plug and play" experience that was promised. I have e-mailed Behringer customer support a couple of days ago and have not yet received a response, so I cannot comment on that. One point I would like clarified is that the LED light indicating that phantom power is being received is always green on the mic (I have tried it in 8 different USB ports on 2 different computers) whereas the documentation says it should be blue. Whether this indicates insufficient power from the USB port is something I would be interested in knowing. On the plus side, this is a very solid and good-looking piece of gear, heavy and substantial in feel and offering the kind of convenience and low-cost solution I was looking for. It came with an adapter (but you still need to buy a mic stand) and a software CD. There is Juice software for podcasting, Kristal and Audacity for recording and editing. These last two are free software. Kristal's last version (dating back to June 2004) is still available for free download online but it's handy to have it on CD. As for Audacity, I prefer to use the latest version directly from Sourceforge. The best advice I can offer to anyone who is encountering similar issues to mine with the C-1U is to resist the temptation to shout or play into it at close range, as condenser mics are very sensitive to such assaults. Five to six inches away is the recommended distance otherwise you get distortion. What finally worked for me was to separate the input jacks in the Control Panel, Audio Manager (I'm running Windows Vista Home Premium), turn the microphone (input) volume to the maximum in Audacity (having given Audacity control of the mic), and respect the 5-6 inch distance for both guitar and voice. I then apply amplification and/or normalization to the resulting recorded sound wave. My research indicates that the problem of the low sound is common to other condenser mics of the USB variety, and I have seen suggestions that Vista is not very user-friendly in that respect. With my current set-up, I am happy with the sound I am getting, there is no hiss and I love the ease of the USB connection. The three stars rating reflects all the hoops I had to jump through to get acceptable results. Behringer C1U Studio Condenser Microphone with USB

I have been using Garageband on a Macbook Pro for just a few weeks now and wanted a mic that was going to give me better results than the on board mic of the macbook. I have tried to record acoustic instruments using the on board mic but results were not great. After looking around I wanted a mic that did not require phantom power as it would just add more expense purchasing a power supply. I opted for the Behringer C-1U as it was powered from the USB which is just very convenient for me. After reading other reviews about the low volume issues I was a little wary, however I have no issues with recording volume as I simply turned the mic input up in my audio settings to 90%. When recording my acoustic guitar from about 1 foot away the results were great and so much better than the on board mic, I tried a few vocals and again so much better than the on board mic. Agreed that there is a little hiss at the high level but nothing that cant be filtered out with software but this still gets 5 stars from me as I have used other mics in this price bracket and none even come close to the recording quality I get from this. *Update* After using this for over a mouth now I still have no issues with recording level. I have some noise as expected but noisegate in Garageband got rid of most of it, Here is a sample of the recording of acoustic guitar and vocals. Noisegate has only been applied to vocal tracks not the acoustic recording. [...]

I am only just getting into making music recordings using my voice and electro-acoustic guitar. I am using this mic with a M-Audio Fast Track. This mic has worked out well and produces a nice enough sound. Remember that this Mic requires that you have Phantom Power, which my M-Audio supplies, otherwise you will not hear much as the volume will be too low. I have tested the different settings on the mic and found that although not perfect, the 3 settings (cardioid, omnidirectional or figure eight pickup patterns) work reasonably well. Using the cardioid setting is particularly useful to me as it help block out much of the hiss generated from my PC fan. For the price, I think this is as good a mic as you are going to get. I have seen in forums that you would have to spend more to improve on it, but I have also seen that people argue that if you understand how to set up your environment optimally, you may find spending more on a mic to be pointless as the amount of improvement to the sound is not worth the extra. Once I had tweaked all my settings and recorded from the correct distances etc, I had a surprisingly clear recording. So I would recommend this to others who are just getting into making recordings of whatever nature as a good affordable starting point. I for sure do not feel the need to get anything else and I think that will be the case for a while.

This mic is good looking, has a good hard case, came with 2 different mic stand adapters, is flexible but did not meet my needs which I considered to be fairly simple. It has 3 modes of operation: cardioid (front focussed), cardioid (front and rear focussed) and omni directional. It also has a 10dB base cut for recording instruments that need it. Being a condenser mic it also requires a 48V phantom power connection. However, it was not able to perform in the way I was hoping it would. I have a small rehearsal room (12ft square) where 4 of us sing and rehearse with keyboard backing. I wanted this mic to work in omni directional mode to record us singing new songs so that we could review the recording and see where we were getting it right, and where needed more work. My vision was keyboard auto playback and the 4 of us standing around the mic; I tested it with just two of us. So, I'm not looking for an elegant CD-quality recording that we could (for example) put on our website, but rather just something useful to our rehearsals. The mic was connected to a Windows 10 desktop PC running CuBase Elements 11 and using a Focusrite 4i4 audio interface which is renowned for its excellent mic preamps. I found that the input gain control on the 4i4 needed to be at max in order to get a reasonable signal level to record, and at that level there was a lot of background noise even when everything was quiet. If I turned down the gain until the background noise subsided then there was not enough signal to make a recording, and the Focusrite indicated "insufficient signal". The resultant recordings were not good enough to be used for our intended purpose, and so I returned the mic. However, before returning it, I tried looking at YouTube reviews of this and other room mics. One particular review of 4 such mics, two at budget prices like this one, and 2 far more expensive ones were really excellent reviews, were using a Focusrite 18i20 audio interface, and also reported that the signal level from this mic was rather low. That same review concluded that multi-functional mics, like this one, were a compromise and that if you were only going to use it in one particular mode (in our case, omni directional mode) then you'd get better performance buying an omni directional mic and not one that has switchable modes. After thinking long and hard about it, because I really liked the idea of this mic, I sadly decided to return it.

Love the clarity of sound i get from these, little hum if you turn gain too high but that's expected might get another 2 for the guitars