ECM8000 : Top choice for recording noise' from neighbors

Great microphone for the price. I'm not an audio expert or anything - I bought the mic to record noise from my neighbors as proof. It does the job well enough. I chose measuring omni condenser mic because I wanted the recording to sound as natural as possible - so you can hear the room like if you were there. That's not possible due to low sensitivity but at least it still picks up some background sounds that serve as a comparison to the neighbor's noise and the recorded sound is neutral (you need to fix your headphones with eq though to hear it as neutral - for Android you can use wavelet).

One big issue with this mic is its self-noise. It's too big to be able to record "silence" in the room and it isn't sensitive enough to record reverberations of room sounds (I think that's what is meant when you say "you can hear the silence"). However, for what I need it for it does well. The self-noise is normal for this kind of microphone (measuring), so I read.

This is my first microphone (apart from gaming sets) but the sensitivity seems low. You read everywhere how condenser mics pick *everything*. Well, surprise - they don't or at least not well enough. I paired this microphone with UM2 (cheap product.... I know) and I need to crank up the gain all the way to the max (with recording level at 54 in Windows) to get decent enough volume of the noise in the room. I read online I should have set it up the other way around - windows recording volume at 100 and then increasing gain. According to a review from a youtuber Kraus Behringer um2 has a good gain so if you want to record something silent you may need a different mic.

One small tip, make sure your windows settings match those in the recording software. At first I had default windows settings (16bit, 44100Hz) with 48000Hz in Audacity then over the weeks of usage I stumbled upon the windows settings and changed then to 48000Hz so they both matched. Noise dropped quite a bit. Not of the microphone but overall recording. Much cleaner and smoother sound.