Microphone Performance

The bi-directional boom microphone of the Cooler Master MasterPulse MH320 was tested by connecting it to the Asus Prime B350-Plus motherboard. It uses an integrated sound card with Realtek's ALC887 audio codec, including a number of software tweaks for suppressing ambient noise and adding various effects. All of this has been turned off for this test in order to obtain the microphone's raw, unmodified sound. I also used an external USB sound card, Creative's cheap Sound Blaster E1 ($42), and again turned off all the software features that could affect the sound of the microphone.

To review the microphone's sound and to compare it to other similar headsets, I used the Adam A7X speakers and Shure SRH840 headphones, being studio monitors, connected to Audiolab's M-DAC, a high-quality digital-to-analog converter that functions as an external sound card when connected to a PC. The testing was done in Discord, TeamSpeak, Skype, and Audacity, and I also used Audacity to record sound from the microphones. The sound was recorded with microphone sensitivity set to 100% and was not post-processed or edited in any way.

For reference, this voice recording has been made with Rode NT-USB, a high-quality studio microphone:



This is the sound recorded by using the bi-directional boom microphone the Cooler Master MasterPulse MH320 is supplied with:




The microphone's quality exceeded my exceptions. Even though the built-in bi-directional microphone doesn't pick up much in terms of depth, your voice won't sound tinny or telephonic either, so your teammates definitely won't complain about you not being clear or understandable enough. To get the most out of it, especially in terms of volume, keep it as close to your mouth as possible. In case your integrated sound card produces a lot of static noise on the microphone's input, you might want to lower the microphone's sensitivity a bit, or your teammates will hear themselves and everything else playing in your headphones as it is being broadcast over your VoIP app of choice, assuming you're using it in Voice Activation mode.

Here are samples of a few other headset microphones, with most of them being more expensive than the MasterPulse MH320, but offering almost no - if any - improvements in terms of microphone quality: