 Welcome to an unboxing and overview of something that's a little bit unusual for us. This is the SL300 condenser microphone. It's part of the Studio series available on editorskeys.com. And the idea here is that it is a relatively low-cost USB microphone. It's driverless. It works on Mac, PC, or Linux. And according to at least one testimonial on their site, which is of course the least biased source of information possible about a product, it is comparable in terms of audio quality to $2,000 microphones, which I mean, I guess we'll let you guys be the judge of whether it is better at least than a couple of other microphone solutions we have that are similar in price. So inside the very well packaged box that has nice soft foam for protecting the gear when it's in transit, we have the SL300, which is, I mean, I guess they're just kind of targeting sort of a very clean, unassuming look because people will be using it as a podcasting mic. So they talk about using it for podcasting as well as for vocal recording and instrument recording. It does have a low-pass switch here, so you can eliminate any sound recording under around 200 hertz or so, so you don't pick up too much bass. And then it also has a minus 10 decibel switch, which might be useful so we don't have to do any leveling in post if, you know, Luke and I, for example, are recording in two of them next to each other because I tend to talk a lot louder than him. Other than that, you find a USB-B interface on the bottom and that is pretty much it. You also get a nice supple USB-A to B cable as well as a shock mount that just uses your standard mounting mechanism to mount it to whatever you want. It's got some foam along the inside as well as elastic cord around the outside so that you're not going to, well, so that it does what every shock mount does. All right, now we did got a couple of accessories with it. So we've got a dual layer pop filter. This is, I think, a $30 adder is what we sought for. And then we've also got the portable vocal booth pro. Now we do some voiceovers for the pre-roll ads that we run before our videos. And what we've noticed is that aside from having issues with the P sounds that cause unnecessary harshness in the recording, so we got the pop filter for that, we also found we're getting a lot of echo because we don't have an optimal recording environment. So this supposedly will help and we're going to give you guys some before and afters of how all this stuff is working for us right here in just a moment. I guess I should also mention a couple of other things as a five-year warranty and it has dual 34 millimeter internal shock mounted diaphragm. So that's something I also meant to mention as well. All right, so now that we've actually set up the entire editor's keys setup, the pop filter is actually fairly rudimentary. It just comes with a standard tension mounted clamp down here. So you can affix that to the stand that the microphone itself sits on. You can affix it to this bracket right here or here, wherever the heck you would want. And you can reposition it with pretty much infinite flexibility. So you can tighten this to adjust the tension here to make sure that it doesn't accidentally slip around. And other than that, yeah, that's pretty straightforward. Next up, we've got the shock mount. So it was pretty easy to slip the microphone into it. It's just, you know, a standard sort of foam insert. And then it's also got a gap in the back here. So it just stretches wider to accommodate the microphone. And it's just pressure mounted like that. So you don't actually have to clip anything into place. If there was something I was going to complain about, because overall we've actually already done our recording test. So we're filming this after we had already done it. Sounds quite nice. If there was something I was going to complain about, it would probably be that this is a little bit flimsy right here. And I would like to be able to tighten it and have it really stay in place a little bit more easily than that. I think we're going to go ahead and take a short break here so that I can show you guys how this guy works. Well, I guess I can show you from the ground. So the stand it comes with is very robust. We were actually impressed with the quality of the stand. So you've got nice plastic feet right here. You've got nice attention to detail and things like the loosening and tightening mechanisms. It doesn't feel cheap at all. So that's really nice to have. There's also a lock here so you can keep it from accidentally slipping or something like that evidently. And then the construction of the portable booth has kind of a metal backing on it. So that's a perforated metal backing. It's got little sort of foam feet on the bottom. I wouldn't call them rubber feet but little three little foam feet on the bottom. So you could set it up on a desk if you want. If you don't want to set it up on the stand. We actually had to remove one of the feet in order to attach the stand to it. So that comes off just like that. And then the stand screws into the bottom. And then it has acoustic pyramid foam all on the inside. The whole thing actually folds up so you can loosen these two feet a little bit right here. And then you can fold the thing up like this if you did want to transport it or take it anywhere with you. So actually I guess that's all there pretty much is to say about it. And it's going to come down to how does it actually sound. So now it's time for our microphone test. I know we don't have a whole bunch of other studio mics to compare against but if nothing else we can give you guys some idea what we wanted this thing for aside from a more podcast style show that might be coming. Stay tuned for that by comparing it to some of the other microphone technologies that we have available to us. So for comparison we have a reasonably I'd say mid-range wireless lav mic. So this is an EW100G3 from Sennheiser with the stock lav. We've also got an NTG2. So this is a fairly well regarded road mic, pardon me, red mic. So that's a shotgun microphone. We've got a Shure Beta 58A which is an iconic microphone for recording vocals. And you'll even see some famous stand-up comedians using it. It's an old design but tried and true. And then finally we have the SL300 which has a very satisfying blue LED now that we've actually hooked it up in its little portable recording studio thing. And we're going to be positioning ourselves pretty close to it because we're going for that AM radio deep sound whether it's a podcast or a pre-recorded message in front of our videos. So in order to give you guys some idea of the difference in the recording quality we're going to record this in four different ways and it is my VPN hotspot shield pre-roll that I do in front of some of my videos. So first up we're going to take these three mics all at the same time because that's pretty easy. And here we go. Hotspot Shield VPN service makes your browsing experience safer, more secure, and more private. Click now to learn more. Hotspot Shield VPN service makes your browsing experience safer, more secure, and more private. Click now to learn more. Hotspot Shield VPN service makes your browsing experience safer, more secure, and more private. Click now to learn more. Hotspot Shield VPN service makes your browsing experience safer, more secure, and more private. Click now to learn more. So in order to be fair to the other microphones we wanted to try this one without the benefit of the recording studio thing that actually costs about as much as the microphone. So here we go guys. Hotspot Shield VPN service makes your browsing experience safer, more secure, and more private. Click now to learn more. And finally because we tested the other microphones without a pop filter which we didn't have before let's go ahead and take a crack at that with this one as well. Hotspot Shield VPN service makes your browsing experience safer, more secure, and more private. Click now to learn more. I'll leave it to you guys what's actually better and which sound you prefer but if nothing else this has been a little bit of an interesting investigation into how different microphones will produce different sounds even with the same voice doing the same thing over and over and over again. Thank you very much for checking out this video on Linus Tech Tips. Click like if you liked it, click dislike if you disliked it, and as always guys don't forget to subscribe. 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