I Bought a ₦8,000 Mic, Then Upgraded to the ₦150,000 DJI Mic Mini. Was It Worth It?

I've been wanting to take my content creation a little more seriously for a while now, especially since I'm getting more comfortable in front of the camera.

But there was one piece of advice I kept hearing from almost every content creator and self-appointed content guru: if you're going to upgrade anything, upgrade your audio.

And it makes sense. You can get away with imperfect lighting or an expensive camera you don't own. Bad audio, though, can make even a great video difficult to watch.

So I decided it was finally time to get myself a wireless microphone. Naturally, I did what anyone with an internet connection would do. I started Googling.

I went through reviews, YouTube videos, online stores, and comparison videos, looking for the best microphone I could get without spending too much. One option kept appearing, especially once I started looking at affordable wireless microphones: the K9.

At about ₦8,000 (~$6), it didn't feel like a particularly risky experiment. If it could make my audio noticeably better than my phone's built-in microphone, I would consider the money well spent.

So I bought it.

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TechloyLouis Eriakha

My ₦8,000 experiment

When the K9 arrived, there wasn't much ceremony involved. I unpacked it, connected the receiver to my phone, clipped the microphone onto my shirt, and started recording.

And honestly, I had high hopes for my ₦8,000 microphone.

To be fair, it immediately changed the way my recordings sounded. Its biggest strength was also one of the first things I noticed: it did a surprisingly decent job of cutting out surrounding noise.

People talking in the background, a fan running, or just general ambient noise–the K9 made an effort to push those sounds behind the person speaking.

For someone recording a quick video for TikTok or Instagram, that's useful.

There's also something to be said for how easy it is to use. You don't need an app or 20 minutes of setup. You connect the receiver, clip on the microphone, and start recording. For ₦8,000, that's not bad.

Then I listened back properly.

And that's when I realised the K9 had solved one problem without quite solving the one I actually cared about.

The K9 made me easier to hear, but not necessarily better to listen to

The K9 made the person speaking easier to hear, but it didn't necessarily make them sound better.

In fact, there were moments when I preferred the sound of my phone's built-in microphone. The K9's audio has this compressed, slightly hollow quality to it. The surrounding noise gets reduced, but the speaker's voice loses some of its natural quality in the process.

At times, it sounds like you're speaking through a tin can.

And that created a strange situation. I had bought a microphone specifically to improve my audio, and while it was doing a decent job of separating my voice from the world around me, the actual voice quality wasn't particularly impressive.

That's not to say the K9 is completely useless. If your phone's microphone is poor, you're recording somewhere noisy, or you just want to experiment with wireless audio without spending much money, it can still do the job.

But using it made me curious about what quality I would get if I spent more. So, I started digging again.

From ₦8,000 to ₦150,000

This time, I wasn't looking for the cheapest wireless microphone I could find. I wanted something I could use if I actually decided to take content creation seriously.

That's when I started seeing the DJI Mic Mini.

But the price difference was impossible to ignore. The K9 cost me about ₦8,000, while the DJI Mic Mini cost about ₦150,000 (~$112). That's almost 19 times more.

At that point, the question wasn't whether the DJI had better specifications. It should. The question was whether a microphone could actually sound and feel almost 19 times better.