Zalman ZM-MIC1 High Sensitivity Headphone Microphone with Mini Clip, Computer PC Streaming Gaming Mic, 3.5mm Jack

Getting sick of the quality of gaming headsets, I bought myself a quality set of cans and needed me a microphone for gaming. I kept seeing this product recommended everywhere, and, for the price, I decided to give it a go. I was skeptical that a clip-on mic would produce a decent sound quality and not pick up tons of background noise. I was wrong. My voice is perfectly clear and, even with an electric fan on in the background a lot of the time, the microphone didn't seem to pick up any annoying background noise. I'm very satisfied with this product. The wire is very long and has rubber clips along it that you can use to clip onto another wire (say, a headset). The clips aren't universal and will mostly fit smaller wires, but they're a nice touch that do work somewhat okay with my HD600 cord. The main microphone clip doesn't appear to be adjustable, so be careful if whatever you're clipping it onto is too thick or too small. This product isn't a super high quality mic, but it will do just fine for chatting or gaming. For the price, the quality is great.

Good choice for simple voice chat uses. Pair with nice headphones and it gets the job done for gaming. More than adequate for Skype and other voice programs. But not as clear or functional as a gaming microphone for regular gamers. Would fail to meet most standards if you were wanting to do audio recordings for podcasts or youtube videos. Like many people, I wanted a mic to go with my high quality headphones. My PC headset with built in mic had speakers that were pretty shoddy, so this seemed like a no brainer. Use my high quality music headphones with this mic instead of spending $100 or so on a gaming headset? Yeah! And it works in that regard to some degree. The mic clips to your headphone cable, so it's mostly out of the way, and not immediately in front of your mouth. This is nice, but also works against the mic. To compensate for this, the mic is omni-directional, so it picks up sound in all directions and is highly sensitive. So most importantly, your voice does come through fairly clear. But it also picks up anything else in the room. Fans, keyboard noises, mouse noises, dogs shuffling by, and whatever else you can think of. Without noise canceling, it's a live line. Now for things like Skype and Google chats, I wouldn't imagine this to be a problem. If you need a mic for that purpose, look no further. The quality is good for the price, the sound comes through mostly clear, and you'll be understood by your friends. A sound purchase. For gamers, this means this mic is almost required to be a solely push-to-talk mic. That's not necessarily a bad thing in a larger group, but with just a handful of friends and I, we like to use the voice activated transmitting in Mumble and Vent so we're not forced to press the key constantly. For this purpose, the mic worked... so so. With no mute switch, I had to software mute the program if somebody came into the room to talk to me. Luckily you can bind these keys with the software, but just something to keep in mind. Also, since the mic was picking up so much background chatter, I had a much harder time setting it to recognize when I was talking versus typing, putting my drink down on the desk, moving the mouse, etc. Once again, these are only issues if you use voice activated transmission. But even with push-to-talk enabled, the sound quality is distant. Comparing it to other mics I have, it sounds like you are speaking away from the mic. My friends said I always sound like I'm away from the computer a little bit. Kind of tin can sounding. Clear enough? Sure. Just not all that loud and audible. Not as good as my relatively cheap Xbox/PC headset mic ( Xbox 360 Sharkoon X-Tatic SX Stereo Gaming Headset ) which rests closer to the mouth. For this reason, I preferred using the headset and sacrificing my listening quality so my friends could hear me loud and clear. I've also done recording comparisons, and when it is placed in the "clip" position on the headset wire, it is by far the quietest mic I have and picks up a lot of white noise. However, sound quality DOES improved quite a bit as you move it closer to your mouth. This kind of makes you want to lean down a little while talking and that's not a terribly convenient feature. I gave this item 4 stars because it does exactly what it advertises. It works. And for the price, it works fine. But those expecting an extremely clear and functional mic should temper their expectations. Sound tests of the mic can be found on Youtube, and you'll hear some of the "tinny" and "distant" sound with lots of background "noise" that I referenced in this review. I don't regret buying it, since it's served me well for 6 months now without much fuss, but it also lead me to buy a nicer gaming headset and research higher quality PC microphones such as the Snowball and Blue Yeti. If you want quality sound, and have the cash (~$60-$100), look into those two brands and you'll find exactly what you need. For everybody else, this is a cheap alternative, but I did not find it as good as mics that rest near the mouth and that offer some form of noise canceling to reduce background noise clutter.

I purchased the Zalman several months ago and have been using it consistently. I'll keep it simple with a pro and con list. PROS: -Price: Seriously, $9 for a mic that provides such good sound quality? What's not to like about that... -Setup: I know a lot of microphones are like this, but the plug-n-play is simple and couldn't be easier -Ergonomics: Getting the Zalman set-up on my headphones was easy and fit like a charm. Quality: The sound quality is on par with price. For $9 you WILL NOT find a mic that preforms at this level, plain as that. CONS: -Cable: The cable is very long (not a con for some people), and worst of all it is very thin! I didn't have a problem with either of these, but you have a habit of running over cables with your chair, be warned! OVERALL: If you want a cheap microphone that's preforms decently, buy this. Heck, buy this thing as a backup. For $9, you cannot beat it. NOTE: I have since upgraded to a Antlion ModMic. Similar to the Zalman, but more expensive and with phenomenal sound quality. Costs about $35, check out their website if you want to step up from a "decent" microphone. (modmic.com)

After my Plantronics GameCom 780's broke (literally snapped in half) I decided to go a different route with my gaming headset. I bought a pair of Sony MDR-7506 headphones, and ran this mic through the coil of cable. The Good: The mic clips to the headphone cord and holds itself there securely. You never have to worry about positioning it, because it's always hanging by your mouth. Also, the cord is VERY long, so I had no problem connecting to my computer. The Bad: There are little clips on the wire that are designed to grip the cord. This is all well and good, but works terribly on a coiled headset. They turn into little barbs that grab the cable and bunch it up in weird places. You can't cut them off because they are fused to the plastic of the wire. Not a deal breaker for everyone, but annoying to coiled wire folk. Also, the audio is not great. This should not come as a surprise to you, since it is a tiny mic, but the sound is very thin and not bassy at all. It does the job, but does not sound particularly good. If you talked into a webcam mic, you are getting basically the same sound. It's a very ok microphone, and the price is good, all things considered. But I am currently looking into getting something a little more robust.

Let me start off by saying that I ordered this mic a little less than one year ago and have used it quite a bit for skype, gaming, etc. throughout that time on a regular basis. I bought this mic with standalone earphones in order to stay away from the way overpriced "gaming" headset market. Put simply the mic works great, but had a fatal flaw. Here's my pro and con list: PROS: - Sound quality is great. I had no static over the line, it easily picked up my voice, and surprisingly it didn't pick up too much background noise for being an open mic decently far from my mouth. - The main wire clip stays put. It never fell off the entire time using it. CONS: - The small clips along the wire that are supposed to hold it on the main wire of your headset are basically useless. They are very small and cheap, and they constantly fell off. I eventually just stopped trying to use them. So while it stays connected at the mic very well the wire will hang independently from there. This can be slightly annoying with tangled wires and the like, and probably led to my next issue. - This is the big one: the wire has a fairly hard thin plastic cover. This leads to a brittle cord that easily cracks without much strength to keep it from bending. At the time of writing this review my mic has just recently broken and no longer works because of this issue. I treat my equipment well, but the hard plastic wire casing still completely cracked through leaving the internal wire exposed. Without the structure of the surrounding plastic the wire itself soon lost connectivity. If the wire clips along the wire worked better it would have been able to parasitically use the strength of the thick headset cord to prevent bending, but that wasn't the case. Pictured is the broken mic wire in comparison to the headset wire.

You cannot beat this mic for the price. In fact, I bought two when it was on sale for $6ish. Sound quality is amazing, huge improvement over my headset's build in mic. I was using this to stream and my followers immediately noticed the change. It does pick up a LOT though, so you'll want to make sure you're not using it in a noisy environment. Also, you need some distance on it. People could barely heat me when I clipped it just under but headset, but when I put it about a foot down the cord, or around where my chest meets my stomach, it was loud and crystal clear. Extreme cord length. You could be sitting WAYYYY back and still have room to spare. This is a blessing and a curse, as I will describe further below. The clip is NOT flexible, I found this out the hard way. My mic cord is braided AND sealed, so it's very thick, and while this flexed a little to compensate, the plastic failed after a few weeks. My solution followed in the following line, as it's my only other complaint. When you run a USB headset, this becomes an extra cord running over your desk. Also, since the cord is extremely longer, there is A LOT of it. What I ended up doing, especially after the plastic clip portion broke, is taping the mic itself to my headset cord, and then using little pieces of scotch tape down the length of my headset cord to fasten the mic cord in place. This helped a ton with the slack, and also prevented the very thin and long cord from getting tangled with my other devices, as I found it did so easily. You seriously cannot make any complaints with this mic. Insane audio quality, will pick up A LOT in your room, and under $10. I don't understand all of the negative reviews. I think some people expected a Blue Yeti for under <$10 o_O.

Okay, needed a mic really badly a while ago so I purchased one of these seeing how it was compact, had somewhat decent sound quality, and was cheap. And to be honest, there aren't any other nice computer mics at this price that don't look extremely bad (and aren't headsets). When I opened up the package the first thing that came to mind was how long the cable was. It is LONG. Wayyy too long that I had to tie up a decent portion of it and stuck it somewhere behind the desk. PROS : - Quality is good for chatting. - Small, portable, doesn't look that bad. - Cheap CONS : - Cable is too long, if they wanted to give us such a long cable, at least break it into two segments with an extension. - Cable is extremely thin, would easily snap if you caught it (which I wouldn't be surprised at since its so long.) - Clip is retarded, it isn't even a clip, its a fixed design that means you have to jam your headphone cable into (which I don't really want to). They should have made it operate with a clamp so that you can clip it to other items such as clothes. Furthermore even if you do jam the cable into it, it doesn't really keep it secure. Still falls off from time to time. Could be better : - Not much, redesigned clip, perhaps slightly better sound quality, and better cable system? In all, at this price, I forgive it for its design flaws.

I needed a cheap microphone to replace my legendarily cheap Labtec stand-up mic. You know, the long-necked white/wide based design that every foreign company under the sun has made one of. Mine was steadily dying, becoming less sensitive to voice and more so to background noise. And so the search began. A few Googlings later, I came across this little Zalman mic. There are reviews that say it's not sensitive enough, others that complain about the fidgety "clip", but I decided to give it a go. At $7.79 at the time of purchase, I figured at worst I could manually hold it up to my mouth at those times when I *really* needed a mic. Addressing the two above problems... The mic isn't terribly sensitive. Plugged in and microphone boost off, it's far too quiet to be useful. However, with microphone boost enabled, it is sensitive enough for speech to register about 50% up Teamspeak's volume test scale when clipped somewhere below your face (say...to a cord), and about 45% when stuck to the side of a monitor roughly 2ft away from the face. With that high of a boost, though, it does catch a fair amount of background noise, and will definitely catch computer fan/drive noise if your case is open or just loudish. Teamspeak has (pretty good) noise filtering that will remove 90%+ of noise from fans and such; I'd imagine most any decent voice chat program does. Using the filtering in a chat program is definitely preferable to sound card filtration, at least if using Realtek sound, as its filtering over-compresses the audio and makes it sound terrible. The clip isn't a clip, it's a V-shaped bit of plastic that sufficiently large cords can be wedged into. A pair of headphones made for music/movies/personal gaming (those with around-ear pads, like) will probably have a nice, thick cord, which works perfectly. Thinner cords, like those found on lighter/MMO gaming headphones and earbuds probably won't be able to use it. On the other hand, once the microphone boost is cranked up, the mic is sensitive enough that you can lay it on the desk or stick it to your monitor and it'll work fine, so this isn't really a dealbreaker. A proper sprung clip would have been nice, but then we'd be dealing with either a higher price point or a likely flimsy clip. So, is it a good mic? Yes, for $8ish, it's a very good mic. It's not faultless, but for the price you really can't go wrong. If you need high sensitivity out of the box, though, you may want to look elsewhere. Ditto for hardware background noise filtering/cancelling, as this microphone has absolutely none built in. So finally, obligatory pros/cons; Pros: *Small, very light *Clips onto larger headphone cords and holds well *Sound comes through adequately loud and clear with microphone boost and noise filtering on, and will consistently pick up clean voice from a couple feet away plus if needed *Long cord, something like 8-10ft *Cheap! Cons: *Clip isn't a clip, and the narrowest point in it isn't narrow enough to fit smaller headphone/earbud cords *Way too quiet by itself, needs software help to get its output up to useable levels, at which point it picks up moderate levels of background noise *No built-in noise filtering, literally a microphone connected to a cable and that's it *As others have pointed out, the 3.5mm plug is bulky; it should fit with other plugs in onboard or front panel outlets, but sound cards with closely-spaced outlets will have issues

Been using for 3 weeks, product working well, definitely worth the price. Just clip to shirt or collar.

Quality of this mic is not bad, high quality sound recording. I am satisfied.

Great value microphone. I was looking for a gaming headset but love my current headphones (M50X) too much to make a switch. A lack of space also means I'm not going for a fullsize microphone either. This gem did the job. Fellow gamers are able to hear me clearer now and at a softer volume without compromising quality. One thing to note - this mic picks up sound from all around so if someone else is speaking in the background, the other end of the mic hears it as well.

It's cheap, it clips to your cable, it's convenient. It sounds pretty bad so don't expect to record your singing with it, but for basic comms in games or voice chatting with grandma it's fantastic.

Being into high end 'Hi-Fi' headphones rather than gaming headsets, I found myself needing a mic. A friend reccomended the mod mic by Antlion so I got one and it is excellent! However curiosity also made me get one of these, despite the somewhat 'mixed' reviews and I can say that for the price, this little mic is EXCELLENT. It clearly picks up my voice and suprisingly, not much of the background noise either. I have done a side by side recording of my voice with both this and the modmic, and the difference is MINIMAL. This mic picks up really well and almost sounds the same as the modmic (which is 4 times the price), it is a little noisier, but thats due to its design and placement. Overall a great product and the best value 3.5mm mic on amazon.