How good does the MacBook microphone sound?

The quality of the integrated microphone in the new Apple M1 series should be particularly interesting for mobile users. How nice it would be to leave space-consuming equipment like the interface and an external mic at home and produce the next album exclusively on-the-road. But how good does the M1 mic sound? 1

The initial situation

Since my MacBook Pro decided to fall off the desk, I had to get a new studio computer. Since I travel a lot, it should be a laptop again. At that time, the new MacBook Pros M1 Pro and M1 Max were just released. For this test, the 14 inch version with M1 Pro and 16GB RAM was available. By the way, the microphone is installed in the left speaker section. 1

4

The recording

For this article, an acoustic guitar and a singer were recorded one after the other.

The closer the object to be recorded is to the microphone, the clearer the recording sounds. In any case, people with overly wet pronunciation should consider using an external microphone. For the guitar recording, I placed the microphone so that it pointed at a slight angle to the 12th fret. 1

2

Our setup

The „MacBook Pro Microphone“acts as the input device and „External Headphones“as the output device. On the monitoring side, the beyerdynamic DT 700 PRO X were used. These are closed headphones which, due to their design, ensure that the monitored sound does not end up on the recording. The signal can be levelled directly in Logic Pro X with a control above the respective channel. 1

5

The sound

Except for the lower frequencies, which are a bit muffled, the recordings were quite usable. This „negative“aspect can also be filtered out using a low-cut filter. In particular, the clarity of the audio material is really very good. I have never heard such a good laptop microphone. By the way, the sound samples for this article are completely unprocessed. 1

3

The positioning

Logic Pro X specifies 7.7 ms roundtrip

(4.5 ms output) as the resulting latency with an I/O buffer size of 64 samples. This is a good value for recordings. Care must be taken with positioning. When trying to find the right position, there is a risk of accidentally dropping the laptop somewhere. I recommend that you orient the MacBook Pro so that the microphone is on top. 1

6

The speaker

The integrated speaker system consists of 2 pairs of 6 speakers, each with 2 force-canceling woofers and 2 tweeters. In the test, the reproduction impressed us with a very good reproduction of the audio material. The bass range leaves something to be desired. As an additional reference monitor for mixing vocals or guitar recordings, the speakers certainly work.