turns out you can’t power an xlr mic over a regular 3.5mm connection

I got memed pretty hard by a recent Newegg purchase.

Specifically, this Heumnzoi EP-101L condenser microphone I got on Newegg. (Newegg has since taken down the listing, understandably enough, but it was up as recently as 2024). At the time I bought it, I didn’t have a way to connect a condenser microphone with a regular XLR cable, and I was getting sick and tired of the cheap stuff you usually find with 3.5mm connectors just self destructing and becoming e-waste after a matter of months, so I was looking for the “next step up”, and bought this microphone that promised it could connect both over XLR and 3.5mm, and came with an XLR to 3.5mm cable.

Now, to this microphone’s credit, once you get a regular old XLR cable and plug it into something that can feed it phantom power, it works just like any other condenser microphone and, honestly, sounds fine (MP3 compression excluded of course):

But the thing is, if I hadn’t made an unrelated purchase of a Scarlett Solo for my guitar a couple weeks later, I would never have known what the heck phantom power even was. Most of my friends and/or colleagues in the tech sector had never heard of phantom power either, and weren’t even sure what the heck an XLR was until I started complaining, when I found out this condenser mic I bought wasn’t actually working and I’d still been relying on the faulty webcam mic I was trying to move off of. Imagine how many people bought this and then just didn’t know enough about audio hardware to recognize what it might need, thinking they got scammed out of their hard earned money for a decorative paperweight.

And that’s what I’m soapboxing about this time: the fact that you can just throw a cable with random connectors in, claim “oh yeah it will totally work on that standard” just because you have the plug that fits, and sell it for apparently years before someone eventually gets around to delisting you for your nonsense.

Heumnzoi as a company doesn’t seem to exist in any capacity beyond “they used to have a microphone listed on Newegg, just the one”. What I’m guessing happened is I bought a lower-end condenser microphone manufactured by some other brand, that some guy rebadged and resold at a markup. I’m not as mad as I could be, because I did end up getting a condenser microphone in the end, even if I needed to take another trip to Guitar Center to get it working finally.

But I’m still mad, at least a bit. I shouldn’t have to coincidentally know enough about audio equipment and have an interest in musician hardware in order to get a purchase to work, especially when it advertises and heavily implies that it should “just work” with the cable it comes with, and especially when it was originally meant to be a work purchase because my mic had stopped working in meetings a couple of times.