Umami Audio

Measurement microphones: what to buy, and where

Perfect Soup measures your room from 30 to 100 positions, and every one of those measurements arrives through the microphone. These are the three we recommend — one for value, one for the reference tier, and one for systems with no XLR input — with live prices from the dealers that publish them.

Our picks

The beyerdynamic MM 1 is the one to buy if you are calibrating your own room and want to spend once. Step up to the Earthworks M23R if you measure other people’s rooms, need mics that match each other, or want a calibration file traceable to the individual unit. If your system has no XLR input at all, the miniDSP UMIK-2 is USB and needs no interface — read the note below before you buy one.

beyerdynamic MM 1

beyerdynamic MM 1

The value pick. Omnidirectional, ±1.5 dB from 50 Hz to 16 kHz, ships with an individual frequency-response sheet. Needs an interface with phantom power.

Where to buy

miniDSP UMIK-2

miniDSP UMIK-2

The no-XLR pick. USB, so it needs no interface or phantom power, and every unit ships with its own calibration file. See the note below on Windows: the wizard currently needs the mic and the speaker outputs on one device.

Where to buy

Every price here is one we read from that dealer, not a list price. “Lowest we found” is the cheapest in-stock price across the dealers we can read, which is not the same as the cheapest price anywhere. Prices are checked once a day and shown with the date we read them; they exclude tax and shipping, and the dealer’s own page is always right if the two disagree. Several retailers don’t publish a price a machine can read, so those simply link through. We may earn a commission from some of these links, at no cost to you — it never affects which gear we recommend.

Before you buy a USB mic

The wizard currently needs the microphone input and the speaker outputs on a single audio device. On macOS that is solved today — an Aggregate Device in Audio MIDI Setup combines a USB mic with your output and the wizard sees one device. On Windows it means a full-duplex ASIO interface, so a USB mic paired with separate speaker outputs is not supported yet; two-device support is planned for a future Calibration Wizard update. If you are on Windows today, choose one of the XLR mics — they need an interface supplying 48 V phantom power, and the supported combinations are listed in the FAQ.

Other odd bits

A stand is mandatory — hand-holding the mic drifts between sweeps and adds handling noise on every one of them. For the cable, buy the length that reaches every position from wherever the interface lives: 25 ft / 7.5 m, and a balanced XLR run that long costs you nothing in quality.

Every price here is one we read from that dealer, not a list price. “Lowest we found” is the cheapest in-stock price across the dealers we can read, which is not the same as the cheapest price anywhere. Prices are checked once a day and shown with the date we read them; they exclude tax and shipping, and the dealer’s own page is always right if the two disagree. Several retailers don’t publish a price a machine can read, so those simply link through. We may earn a commission from some of these links, at no cost to you — it never affects which gear we recommend.

Once you have a mic

A microphone tells you what your room is doing. Correcting it is the other half: Perfect Soup measures every speaker and sub across your listening area and solves them together, rather than one channel at a time.

See how it worksRead the calibration walkthrough
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