Microphone Performance

The microphone of the Beyerdynamic MMX 300 2nd Gen was tested by connecting it to the Asus ROG STRIX X99 Gaming motherboard. It uses an integrated sound card with the ALC1150 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 ($50), and again turned off all the software features that could affect the sound of the microphone.

To review the microphone's sound and compare it to other similar headsets, I used the Adam A7X speakers and Shure SRH840 headphones, both 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. 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 the Rode NT-USB, a high-quality studio microphone:



This is the sound recorded by using the microphone the Beyerdynamic MMX 300 2nd Gen is supplied with:



As you can hear, the quality of the microphone is outstanding. My voice sounds deep, warm, and rich, and no noise is present in the input signal. The microphone can be used for absolutely anything, including serious Twitch streaming and YouTube voiceovers, should you want to avoid buying an external studio microphone. In fact, if you are in a room with poor acoustics, you are much better off with a headset that comes with a microphone of this quality than a big external microphone that's going to pick up room echo and other noises. Truly, a superb job was done by Beyerdynamic in the microphone department, and this is without a doubt one of the best gaming headset microphones of all time, matched only by those on the Sennheiser gaming models. For comparison, you can listen to their samples below.





It's interesting to see that the quality of the microphone is also what Beyerdynamic officially uses to explain the significant price difference between their DT 770 Pro headphones ($200/€159) and MMX 300 2nd Gen gaming headset. You can read their official support post here.