 Hi guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Russell here. I want to do a video today comparing the audio quality you're going to get by getting a USB lavalier microphone recording directly into the computer. So USB lav mic versus the audio quality from an XLR lavalier microphone that's being connected into the computer through an audio interface. And I'm doing all this on Ubuntu Linux and recording into OBS. So the first microphone that we're going to be listening to, actually that you are listening to, is that USB microphone. So it's as easy as it can get. It's plug and play. You just hook up your lav mic. That's the one I'm wearing right now. You put that into a USB port on your computer. The microphone that you're listening to is the Maono AUUL10 lavalier microphone is currently retailing on AliExpress for give or take 28 bucks. Some places you'll find it for $20. You might find different prices on if you're looking on Amazon. Now, just to do this transparent thing, I'm going to read the same audio I'm reading from the start of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, amazing book. I want to show you guys firstly at the settings that I have. So the first thing I always do when I'm working with microphones in Ubuntu is I open up my PadU control and I check what the system level I'm using for the microphone is. Now, it can be deceptive because you see microphones. You're not actually using as is the case here. So I'm not using this microphone. So I'm going to actually go ahead and mute it. That's the built-in microphone on the webcam. The microphone you're listening to is this one here, the Maono ALF analog stereo. Now, the levels I'm getting from OBS Studio, I'm going to actually drag over my OBS meter here and you can see kind of where I am. So if I nudge PadU control, I start clipping in OBS. So I'm going to bring this guy down just a little bit here to the kind of volume I'm speaking at. And you can see the level. So I'm doing a minus 6 dB gain in my OBS level. And my level on the system is set to 89%. And that's an offset of minus 3 decibels. And this is the exact audio that you're listening to now. So now I'm going to go ahead and connect up the audio interface from Behringer and that is the Behringer Euphoria UM2. I'm going to be connecting into that. The Comica CVM V020. So that's a XLR microphone that requires 48 volts of phantom power, which that audio interface is going to supply. I'm using the built-in codec that is supported for this operating system. And given that it's a $30 lavalier microphone and that Maono lavalier microphone is also about 30, they're both omnidirectional. I think it should be a fairly decent comparison in terms of a head-to-head for audio quality. So before I do that, let me do the actual reading here, putting away all these things now that the levels are set. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom. It was the age of foolishness. It was the epoch of belief. It was the epoch of incredulity. It was a season of light. It was a season of darkness. It was the spring of hope. It was the winter of despair. We had everything before us. We had nothing before us. We were all going direct to heaven. We were all going direct the other way. In short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received for good or for evil in the superlative degree of comparison only. Okay, that was microphone one. I'm gonna go ahead now and connect to microphone two. And you guys can be the judge of what ended up sounding better audio quality-wise. Okay, so I've gone ahead now and I have connected the audio interface and you're now listening to a different lavalier microphone. This is an XLR lav microphone that I've connected. It's the Comica CVM-V020. I've gone for kind of a similar lav position. It's actually on the other side of my polo shirt but it's roughly the same distance from my mouth and it's also an omnidirectional pickup pattern. So let us go now back to screen two and I'm gonna show you guys firstly what we're working with in terms of meters. So now we can see I'm pulling audio from the, this is the audio interface. Of course, that's the audio source rather than the actual microphone itself. And it's detected on Ubuntu Linux as PCM2902 audio codec. I have the laval as you can see set to 100% and I'll now bring over my OBS audio meter. So you can see the levels we're getting. I think they're kind of similar to what we had. We're kind of peaking there at minus 10 dB there about and minus 9.8 dB is the offset in OBS and there's no offset on the actual master gain setting. And so the other microphone needed a bit of a touchdown to keep it from clipping. So, okay, everything is, I'm gonna leave those as they are so that we should be roughly comparing like with like and I'm gonna do the same thing as I did before reading from the first chapter of Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom. It was the age of foolishness. It was the epoch of belief. It was the epoch of incredulity. I'm pronouncing that wrong. It was the season of life. It was the season of darkness. It was the spring of hope. It was the winter of despair. We had everything before us. We had nothing before us. We were all going direct to heaven. We were all going direct the other way. In short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received for good and for evil in the superlative degree of comparison only. Okay, so I hope that comparison was useful that maybe gave anyone listening a sense for what kind of a difference in audio quality. If there's any discernible, you can detect between a microphone connected via USB directly with the preamp and everything built into just that one component. And alternatively, then connecting via a USB audio interface and using a XLR microphone requiring 48 volts of fan to power. Hope that video was of interest to somebody out there in YouTube cyberspace. If you want to get more videos from me, please subscribe to this YouTube channel.