Modding a USB Condenser Microphone | USB Microphone Hack?

It's time to try a basic hardware hack in an attempt to improve performance. In theory this is a simple hardware mod of a USB condenser microphone that only requires very basic soldering.

This is not a difficult task in a studio microphone that uses an XLR interface, but things get more complicated when it is a USB microphone.

The idea was to do a before and after for the frequency response of a microphone based on using different condenser capsules. I wanted to improve sound quality in my microphone. Basically, I wanted to swap out the active bits of my usb mic as an excuse to learn how to test microphones with fun boring graphs using REW. The mod failed to produce a usable microphone, so this video contains no graphs. Well, it became semi-usable, just not loud enough to be practical.

Did you know that there are two different types of capsule styles for a condenser microphone, because I didn't. I removed the electret capsule from the majority RS pro, and I'm still not 100% sure what type this cheap aliexpress replacement is. It looks like a "true condenser" because it has no Junction Field Effect Transistor (JFET)... but adding a polarizing voltage had no observable effect on the sensitivity, or at least the volume output over USB was exactly the same. The amazon listing I found for this capsule called it electret, but that is questionable. Using different models of JFET, however, did affect the volume - probably due to some of them being higher gain. I might be able to modify the amplifier to increase the output, but that level of reverse engineering is far out of scope of this video.

00:00 - Introduction to the Majority RS Pro
01:17 - quick audio tests before changing the microphone condenser
01:48 - Tear down and modification of the USB Condenser microphone
07:04 - Sound testing the modded usb mic
07:22 - why didn't modding the usb microphone work?

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USB Condenser microphone mod - Can I swap capsules to make the usb mic sound better?