first of all, I drive a loud car. if you drive a newer car with no aftermarket exhaust or anything like that the microphone might work better for you. but if you use the microphone you have less options for music reactive modes. with the microphone there's six or seven with the aux cable there's 15. thing is that the aux cable isn't all that easy to set up in a car stereo and will most likely require the purchase of extra adapters. the way I got it to work best was by taking two RCA y splitters and splitting my outputs to my amplifiers (L and R rear channels although doing one side and the sub output might work a little better) and then using an RCA to 3.5 mm adapter to run out to the unit. in effect I created an AUX out cable. this works very well but it wasn't the simplest thing to do. with the aux cable set up though, the unit works great. where the microphone will only flash between on and off, with the aux cable it will vary the brightness depending on volume so you get more of a pulsey feel rather than like a strobe light.
although I was very skeptical when I purchased this unit, I've been very satisfied with it and have been using it for a couple months now without issue

So this works very well but has a small flaw. The microphone music sync is delayed. Use the 3.5mm jack to your music source like the iPhone, deck etc. and it no longer plays on the regular speakers. Bluetooth won't fix this. There must be way to split sound and feed both speakers and music RGB controller.

Like the product. Would work great if they had included the power plug. I waited like 2 weeks to get this and was excited when it arrived only to find out there was NO POWER PLUG!!
Update So I changed my review to 4 star because although it came missing the power plug the company said they would send me another one and instead of the power plug they sent sent me a whole New one. Now that's customer service!

The media could not be loaded. Works well, easy to install. I wish the music mode had more variety in modes. I also wish you could control the brightness and speed of the modes for the music part.

The manual modes work just fine controlling the speed and brightness and color effects.

I use the music effects a lot. I had to use a High to low level line converter on a stereo so I can use this in a baot with the stereo, but the effect is awesome. Much better then It listening. There is no delay in the Effects with the audio beats. Also I added a headphone volume adjuster to be able to control sensitivity, There isn't one if your plugging the audio into this controller. The only adjustment is for the mic. Works Great!