My wife was very excited to receive the QIBOX BM-800 Professional Studio Condenser Microphone. We have a music room at home, and she thought about putting this up in our music room for a complete look — and of course, to encourage our children to sing. We have mics at home, but they’re already old, and the QIBOX BM-800 Condenser Microphone was a better replacement — if not a supplement — to our old, existing mics.

The package arrived in good condition, shipped quickly with the Amazon Prime shipping privileges. The QIBOX BM-800 came on a professional-looking retail box, complete with all the necessary kits, including a very useful pop filter.

The QIBOX BM-800 is shorter than a standard microphone, which makes it convenient for placement anywhere.

One of the advantages that I see in this microphone is that you can use it on stage at an actual performance — whether in a church, a hall, or small auditorium. In fact, I was impressed how sensitive it was at picking up vocals even when I was 3 or 4 feet away from the mic. For duets, quarters, or larger groups, this will be the perfect mic to use. I know my wife and I had a lot of fun singing with this mic setup in our music room.

The mic connection is XLR — which is the connection for most professional sound systems these days. For example, that means you can unplug the XLR cord from the regular mic at church and plug it into the QIBOX BM-800 instead, for a better sounding performance if you want to use a condenser mic.

When finished, just pack it up and set it up at your home studio or home office for personal use. It comes with a XLR to 3.5mm Microphone Cable, which can be plugged into a smaller audio device, stereo speaker, or a properly-equipped computer where a 3.5mm input is more typical. The cable itself is almost 10 feet long, which is not bad at all. Unless you already have an XLR to 1/4 inch jack audio cable, you will still need to buy an adapter just in case because the other end of the included cable is a 3.5mm jack (unless all your devices have a 3.5mm input instead of 1/4th inch).

Can you connect it directly to your computer’s mic input? I can’t answer for your computer, but when I tried on mine, the only way I heard sound from the mic was when I put the volume on the very highest setting on both the Audio control panel of my desktop and the computer speakers. I prefer to connect this on a PA system.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: As with most condenser mics, just make sure that your mixer/amp/PA system has phantom power available. Some systems will have a button marked “Phantom.” Without phantom power, the mic will not work at all. If your system doesn’t have one, you can buy one separately. For example, the Behringer Micropower PS400 can be purchased at Amazon, which can provide both a 12v power or a 48v depending on your condenser needs. Mine worked well at the 48v setting. I also bought an extra male to female XLR 3-pin cable for future needs, since the Behringer PS400 only has XLR input/outputs.

If you already have an existing microphone stand and want to use the QIBOX BM-800 , just unscrew the existing mount on that stand and replace with the one the kit comes with. The size appears to be standard to me and it fit my old microphone stand just fine. The included mount acts like a shock absorber. Add the foam cap to cover the mic and you’ll reduce unnecessary background noise even more (such as the blow/wind from your mouth). Put the pop filter in front for an even more improved sound.

The mount is adjustable, so you can position the mic as you prefer. Here it is standing up:

And here is the mic positioned horizontally. You can do any angle you want, depending on your needs.

This kit is so complete at a decent price that you might want to try it first before spending hundreds on a brand name professional line.

The QIBOX BM-800 Condenser Microphone is currently available on Amazon at a 34 percent discount at the time of this writing.