About

MicTested compares microphones, headphones and speakers by the figures their makers publish. Not a shop, not a blog with opinions about how things sound — a reference for the part that can be checked.

What this site is for

Someone about to spend a few hundred on a microphone reads a datasheet and finds numbers with no scale: is 1.12 mV/Pa quiet, is 250 grams heavy, is 20 dB of rear rejection a lot? A single figure answers nothing. Put it beside the same figure from two hundred other models, in the same units, and it answers a great deal. That comparison is what every article here is built to give.

Where the numbers come from

From manufacturers' datasheets and retailer product listings, read one at a time and stored with the page they came from. They are then brought to common units under written rules — millivolts per pascal for sensitivity, grams for weight, hertz with the tolerance the maker stated. The rules, the sample counts and the values we refuse to compare are on the methodology page.

What we do not do

We do not own the equipment, do not measure it, and do not accept review units. There are no listening impressions here, because there is nothing to listen to: an honest review that cannot hear says so instead of inventing an opinion. Owner ratings are shown as distributions rather than averages — a 4.1 built from fours and a 4.1 with fifty ones are different products.

Who is behind it

One person writes and checks everything on this site. No editorial board, no staff of reviewers, no borrowed credentials — the work stands on whether the figures and their sources hold up, and every article names both.

Product photographs

Product photographs come from the shops that sell the item or the companies that make it, and the credit under each gallery names the source of every photograph in it. Every photograph on the site so far comes from one of six: the dealers B&H Photo Video and Adorama, and the makers' own pages — Shure, Audio-Technica, HyperX and Logitech G. This list is the whole of it, and it grows as articles do. They remain the property of their owners. Charts, diagrams and tables are ours, built from the dataset described in how we test.

If an image is used in a way it should not be, or a credit is wrong, write to [email protected] and it comes down or gets corrected.

Contact

Corrections are the most useful mail we get: [email protected]. More on what to send and what to expect is on the contact page.