With your permission, I will divide this review into two parts. The first will actually be a review of the Takstar PC-K850, a condenser cardioid studio microphone of very interesting composition and excellent quality. The second part will be about the situations in which this microphone won’t save you, and what it can.
Video review of Takstar PC-K850
You can take a look at the microphone here:
Market positioning and price
The price of the Takstar PC-K850 is around $114. This classifies the microphone as a mid-budget professional microphone, and it is the professionalism that explains many of the factors associated with it. I note, however, that I can explain them, but I don’t agree with all of them.
Complete set
For example, I can explain the rather poor equipment by the professionalism of the microphone. Because if you are a professional in the studio, not a podcaster or streamer, you don’t need, say, a table mount or XLR cable. Because you will have your own.
As you can see, there is no cable or even a simple mount in the kit. There is only a proprietary pop filter, a spider mount, a nut, a manual and the microphone itself. Oh, and a professional case – which, as in the case of the Takstar PRO82, opens sideways instead of upwards.
Design and features
I will immediately dwell on the only negative feature of the Takstar PC-K850 – the glossy case. The case is ultra-reliable, metallic, but the gloss collects fingerprints so quickly that the “professionalism” of the mirror surface will disappear in two seconds. Because there is no way to even install it without contact to glossy surfaces.
In all other respects, the microphone is great. The spider mount, although proprietary, has two threads, at 3/8 and 5/8 inches. The 3/8 is recessed, but for standard pantographs it fits perfectly.
The Takstar PC-K850 itself is an honest cardioid, with a 34mm gold-plated capsule, professional frequency response and very high peak sound pressure, up to 130dB. Just so you understand – 135dB guarantees a person will be concussed.
The microphone impedance is 200 ohms, equivalent noise level is less than 20 dBA, sensitivity is -32 dB +-3. Frequency response is from 30 to 20000 Hz. The microphone weighs 529 g and requires a 48 V power supply.
Read also: Comparison of Takstar PRO 82, Takstar TS-450 and Takstar HD2000 headphones
As for the sound quality, everything will be in the video below, but for your understanding – Takstar PC-K850 is hardly the best microphone of the company in its class. There are cooler models, but the price is higher there too. The K820, for example, costs 3.5 times more.
Where Takstar won’t help you?
This microphone came to my attention because we needed to shoot videos for volunteers. And for this task we needed a cardioid studio model like the K850. The problem was that the video requirements were unusual, and the audio had to be recorded in a giant studio that had almost no echo cancellation whatsoever.
So it’s very important for you to realize – no matter how good your audio recording tool is, no matter how expensive your microphone is…. it’s not going to save you if you have to deal with noise or echo. Because while noise can be removed from audio, albeit with difficulty, echo can hardly be removed without deforming the audio.
That is, it’s not the microphone that makes the studio sound like a podcast – it’s the studio with acoustic processing for podcasts. But if you’re having trouble finding a place, and the only available one is a studio with high ceilings – there are still options, too. They won’t be free, but they will help.
First – try to remove the echo at least partially with acoustic panels. Some studios have them free of charge for tenants. The cheapest acoustic screen is guaranteed to help you – which, however, will look a little strange on camera.
Also, don’t forget to test the set-up you plan to use in advance. Do you need to stream video online, do you need to write audio in separate files, do you need phantom power for the microphones, will a mini-jack be enough. Whether you’ll be writing audio to the camera, whether you’ll need a separate recorder.
For example, I had a Tascam DR-40X with two XLRs and phantom power. It’s interesting that at one time I almost fought to get a recorder with XLR, because the previous one, Tascam DR-07X, had only mini-jacks. And at that time I didn’t need XLRs, but now they turned out to be indispensable and saved the project.
At the same time, the Tascam DR-40X is no longer suitable for streaming to a PC for live broadcasting, because for some unknown reason it produced very quiet sound as an audio interface. That is, even with the help of professional equipment I would not be able to make a stream with two XLR-microphones that require phantom power. And such nuances you need to know in advance.
Summary of the Takstar PC-K850
On the microphone – you get the picture, it’s great, solidly made, the gloss is infuriating, but both the build quality and sound quality are awesome, especially for its price, so I recommend it without a problem. And I also recommend you don’t forget that in almost any project at least a little professional grade mic is somewhere around 5% of the total requirement.
The other 87% is knowing where you’re going to be shooting. It’s understanding what audio interfaces you’ll have, whether they’ll work for you, and where to look for new ones if the ones you have in stock don’t work. It’s also important to understand whether you can use cameras, and whether it’s going to be streaming or offline recording. And if you understand all of that, then I would recommend the Takstar PC-K850 to you without a problem.
Read also:
- Review of Fifine Ampligame microphone range: A6V, A6T, A6VW, A8, A8W, AM8, A8 Plus and A9
- Sennheiser MKE 600 review: The legendary cannon microphone!
- Takstar SGC-600 Cannon Microphone Review