I received this lovely Cherry UM 6 in really nice packaging, it felt very much like Christmas present with the black tissue paper the microphone was wrapped in, very stylish. This is communicates USB A to USB C, black and red coloring seems to be the motif and you get plenty of cord along with a velcro wire wrap to bundle up the excess wire you're not using. There is a 3.5mm monitor port next to the USB C port on the bottom and the volume knob on the back of the mic opposite the gain knob in front. The tripod stand takes up slightly more real estate than I'd like but is solid. The gain knob presses in to switch omnidirectional and cardioid modes, the mode you're in is reflected by the lights on top of the mic and the color indicates if the mic is muted or not, white it's hot, red it's muted. The lights are somewhat minimalist, only 5 can light up at the most when you're omnidirectional. I set up three microphones but the third one was a full tier below the other two that I mostly ended up comparing the Cherry UM 6 to a HyperX Quadcast (Red only, not RGB). While they're in two different price points, they're on definitely close enough performance wise to compare. For normal voice chatting they're both greatly usable but I liked the way I sounded on the Cherry mic better, there was more nuance and details where as the HyperX was a hair louder but cleaned up and more clinical. Where I noticed a significant difference is with Voicemod and what comes out of the other side after processing. I have a few voices I play with on Voicemod and one particularly trouble voice never sounded right for me, it somehow became nasal, naggy and raspy in tone by the time Voicemod was done processing it. I couldn't make it sound better on the HyperX except by forcing myself to maintain a lower tone which required effort to do. The Cherry in cardioid mode managed to wrangle a lot of the naggy and some of the nasal but when I switched it to omnidirectional the rest of the ick fell away and suddenly it hit the sweet spot. I don't think the mic is magically better but just that it gave the program more to work with. Really impressed that the middle of this UM series is hitting above it's weight. I didn't know what to expect but it really has me thrilled how much quality and value they packed into this.
