EarthworksICON
microphone
New retail price (MSRP)
$299
Used market: $235*
Specifications
6 of 9 values have a recorded sourceExpert Audio Engineering Commentary
Tonal profile
Small-diaphragm cardioid on a micro-USB stem, 20 Hz to 20 kHz with a 132 dB SPL peak and 70 mA of bus power. Earthworks does not state whether the capsule is externally polarised or electret; we classify it as electret because the microphone runs on USB bus power alone, and mark that field as our own judgement rather than the manufacturer's.
Headroom notes
The specification table on the product page lists no bit depth at all. The user guide does, on page 14: "we decided that the ICON would be best as a 16-bit device". Sample rate is not published in either document, so the converter block is left out of this record rather than filled with a plausible 48 kHz.
Gain staging
70 dB A-weighted signal-to-noise against 94 dB SPL puts the equivalent noise around 24 dBA, but Earthworks does not publish that number directly, so the self-noise field stays empty rather than being back-calculated.
What the datasheet actually says
Quoted verbatim from the manufacturer’s own page, with the date we checked it. We state what is printed, not what anyone intended by it.
«SENSITIVITY 20mV/Pa (-34dBV/Pa) ... OUTPUT IMPEDANCE 65Ω ... MIN OUTPUT LOAD 600Ω»
The ICON has one connector and it is USB-C: there is no analogue output at which 65 ohms could be measured, and no external load for the 600 ohm minimum to apply to. These three rows describe the analogue stage inside the microphone, ahead of its own converter. The sensitivity is the valuable part - it is a real dBV/Pa figure where nearly every rival in this class publishes dBFS - but it is a capsule figure, not something a user can meter at a plug.
checked 8/5/2026* Estimated with the depreciation fallback (~79% retained value).