eli5 What does microphone impedance mean, what does it affect and do I need to care about it with a PC USB mic?
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You don’t need to worry about impedance of a UAB microphone.
It’s a measure of resistance presented by the capsule to a preamp, but since there is a fixed gain preamp after the mic capsule that’s presumably correctly matched to it for the digital-analog converter after it to not overload it or the USB circuitry, it’s a moot or even useless spec to care about (and publish, frankly).
HTH.
Impedance is a way of measuring the resistance or efficiency of the microphone.
In traditional audio setups, you want to ensure that you match the impedance of your microphone to the following preamp stage. Doing it correctly means everything will work nicely and efficiently together, mismatch it and you may find it too sensitive or not sensitive enough, introducing issues like noise from gain stages and similar.
You do also have to be careful of different mic types, phantom power needs and other issues in pro audio setups.
When you shift over to USB equipment however, this is all taken care of by the manufacturer. The microphone itself will include the mic and preamp combined as one unit, and is designed to be plugged in to any normal USB port – which should be designed to a standard set of specs so that it will be compatible with any device also using USB standard specs (like your mic).
The point you would have to do your research would be if you moved over to a mic/mixer type setup, using a traditional mic with an XLR connection into a small mixer board/amp unit.
Imedance is another word for resistance, however for alternating current.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_impedance
A microphone is essentially a speaker working in reverse. Instead of an electrical signal interacting with a magnet to make a speaker cone move and push air to create sound waves, the sound waves push the mic diaphragm which interacts with a magnet to make an electrical signal.
The impedance refers to how much that electrical signal is resisted, which means it refers to the strength of the signal. As other people have mentioned that strength needs to be matched to what an amplifier expects to work with, otherwise it will amplify far too much or far too little.
That’s all applicable to the analog electrical domain. But USB is a digital connection. So by the time the audio information reaches your computer’s USB port it has already been converted to ones and zeroes and the impedance value is irrelevant and inapplicable.
So no, you don’t need to care about the impedance value. It’s just marketing wankers trying to make you associate irrelevant numbers with your perception of the product’s quality and value.
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