Is the Elgato Wave 3 still WORTH IT in 2023?

are the elgato wave microphones the main event of their total package let's talk about that my name is chris this is coalition gaming and today i'll be your stream technician real quick if you're new around here and are into pc hardware tech gaming stream tips and tutorials then you're in the right place hit that subscribe button and that bell so you don't miss a single upload also i stream to twitch every friday at 8 pm pacific at twitch.tv coalition gaming crew so feel free to stop by drop a follow and let's talk some tech anyways let's get to the video by now everyone is well aware of what the elgato wave microphones have to offer heck they even release their own wave xlr interface in case you don't know though the elgato wave series of microphones that being the wave 1 and the wave 3 were developed with help from a very legitimate microphone company called luit so it goes without saying the microphones themselves shouldn't disappoint even down to their build quality these are usb cardioid condenser microphones so the pickup pattern will be will pick up like your voice mostly from the front while trying to reject noise from the sides and rear the wave 3 itself features a multi-function dial on the front where you can press down on it to change selection to change input gain adjust volume headphone volume and even adjust crossfade between microphone monitoring and the noises coming through it pretty nifty speaking of headphone volume there is a headphone jack on it for zero latency monitoring too the usb port on the back is type c so that's nice to see instead of the usual micro usb a feature i really like is the capacitive mute on the top aka touch to mute and unmute it's a very nice quality of life feature that has the benefit of not causing any audible click noise that other mics caused from sliding an on off slider now you can add things like a pop filter and a shock mount but they are sold separately so be aware of that however in my opinion a shock mount is an absolute must-have and i go over why right up here anyways that's enough about the hardware specs let's talk about the real game changer that elgato put together with this mic the wavelink software we'll do a sound test with the mic while talking about the software so let's get to it okay so now we're down at the desktop and we have obs open so some things that you have to do first before uh getting the wavelink software going is well this is after you've installed the wavelink software but there's some stuff you have to do in obs to make sure that your mic is set up properly so you go into settings and then you go to audio and you want to do desktop audio um this part doesn't matter so much it could be disabled as far as you know whatever you want there but mike right here mike auxiliary audio don't do it for mic in elgato wave three if you do that you would really only have your voice coming through obs and then your desktop audio is gonna have to be set to one of the virtual inputs in order to get audio but only from that specific input you have to go to wavelink stream think about it obs is what you're using to stream so wavelink to waveleak stream or mic to wavelink stream in obs and there you go and now all the adjustments you make in the elgato wave software will reflect changes in obs oh by the way this entire section where i'm covering obs and the wavelink software is being recorded using the wave 3 microphone okay and with that out of the way we have the wavelink software here for you for you to see i'm going to go ahead and redo this step real quick for you guys so adding a virtual input is as easy as clicking the plus button here and you know they're pre-named ones which is fine i'm just going to go to browser and that way we're going to play some music for you guys like you would for your stream and i'm going to make sure that's turned on quite a bit so this is this song that we're going to be playing you want to add your browser in to play music for your stream for example so once that's added you actually go here to little mixer guy and you make sure that in this the wavelink browser is selected so the virtual inputs can all be directed using the windows volume mixer this screen that we're at right now anything that you want directed in through the wavelink software for you to control it can be done here so obs we could even put like as an auxiliary so we will probably have to add the virtual input but i'm going to make obs wavelink aux 1. now what that will accomplish for you guys as streamers is that when obs makes noise like you get alerts and such well that just means that you can control how loud that is in your headphones versus what the stream hears by making it a virtual input and wavelink let's pause the music now and in order to do that now that i've i told obs windows volume mixer to send it to the aux 1 input i'm going to hit plus and i'm going to go here to aux 1. and now this is what can control the noises that alerts and such will make through obs browser sources like if you're using stream elements for example now looking at the wavelength software you see here monitor mix and stream mix monitor mix is what you're hearing with your headphones and that's if your headphones are connected into the microphones zero latency monitoring jack and stream mix is also right there so if you want to hear how the stream is hearing your audio you just click the little ear on it and it switches over and if you want to go back to just what you're hearing how it is configured for your ears you just click the ear there and then here if you can also adjust the volumes individually so this is what i hear right here and like if i was playing music again here we go i can lower that in my headphones to basically nothing but you guys still are still hearing it a lot louder and in order to like test for that you just click this one yes i hear it louder in my headphones now but it go back to me and it's low and so the cool thing is if you don't want it too loud on the stream you can do it like this let's say you want it lower for you but kind of low on the stream and then you can click the little link button and when you adjust the volume from one it dynamically takes them together just like that so a little bit louder for you is also a little bit louder for the stream very useful now i'm hooked up with a laptop right now which actually has its own built-in microphone but if you're hooked up in your whole streaming setup odds are you probably already have a headset or other microphone and if for some reason you wanted to use a different microphone maybe in a different scene or just something maybe you like better or just wanted to test things out the elgato wavelength software does allow you to add your own microphone if you just add it like that there it is i'm going to go ahead and mute that though so there we go as you can see you can see the the bar is bouncing on there the laptop can hear me the micro the other microphone works so then you can basically if you wanted to you could even just use that for it but i mean you're paying this much for a microphone you might as well use this one this one definitely doesn't sound bad at all you can even rearrange your inputs here that's if you wanted to move them around just to like have a better idea visually of where you want your stuff you just drag them and move them around like that and i believe you can add up to eight virtual inputs probably something that's limited to the total number of virtual inputs that you see here so let's say uh uh steam you know what i mean so let's see one two three four uh five six seven eight these are the virtual inputs that elgato's wavelength software lets you use and that's probably the maximum amount that you can add in the software as a result and that's really it with the software it's really straightforward really simple and the cool thing about it is what i just mentioned about how to dynamically adjust the volume for your headphones for what you hear versus what the stream hears that applies for everything every any game that you might be playing as well and if you are playing a game that's something you can just all set into the wavelength game input and whenever you play a game let's say let's just pretend here for a second that steam is a game so here you just go in and set the the let's see the output device for it to go to to be the wavelink input so you would just set it to game wavelength game just like that and then anytime you launch that game windows remember hey i'm going to send it to the wavelink virtual input and then whatever you control in the wavelink software will control for your stream as well one other thing i wanted to demonstrate is the clip guard clip guard is a really really nice feature of the software and of this microphone as you can see here clip card is turned on and no matter how loud how loud i yell like i'm about to do right now just a warning you won't see this hit the red you won't hear me peek loud i only saw it go into the yellow and then if i turn the clip guard off loud big difference now one thing i haven't checked is if you can turn the clip guard on into the other like microphone that you might add so let's check there and uh doesn't look like it so i guess that's something that is uh specific to the elgato software or if you wanted to use your own mic and have clip guard but you don't necessarily need to buy this microphone you can buy the new wave xlr interface and then you have access to clip guard using your own microphone so it's good that elgato gives you options and lastly i wanted to talk a little bit more about the features of the microphone that maybe i didn't already talk about too much this is a condenser microphone so it's actually very sensitive so if you got a lot of background noise stuff like that you might be looking into rtx voice nvidia broadcast or just in obs turning on something like noise suppression can help because uh yeah condenser microphones especially this one they seem to be pretty sensitive pick up a lot and yeah i had to close doors and turn all sorts of things off in my room in order for it to hear mostly me and i can still hear it in my monitoring picking up the fans of my laptop which can get annoying that could be me that could mean that it can pick up the fans of your computer when you're like in a hardcore gaming session and stuff is really really cranking down if you're playing warzone and streaming and it's a single pc setup your fans are going to be going for example and good chance this picks it up so noise suppression is something to look at so i mean i'm not going to knock this mic for having a really sensitive a high sensitivity because that's kind of a thing of condenser microphones but just something to be aware of also as you can see i have this mounted on an arm it came with the adapter to mount it to the arm in the box if you don't find it just look again you'll see it in there and i think this is a much better way to use the mic than the included stand even though it's a nice solid sturdy stand mostly because um well it can get closer to your mouth this way and as you can hear if i actually face the microphone and i speak into it the proximity effect is actually very very nice however when you're doing this there's a good chance that you're probably going to want a pop filter but uh yeah but most people will be using it off to the side like this pop filter is a little less important in that sort of situation i gotta say though i love the software this is amazing software and uh the one thing that i wish that it had was let's see midi controller capability like i've featured the korg nano control 2 up here if you want to check out the video also leave it leave it in the link down in the description below where it has hardware faders on it now if you had hardware faders to control what you're seeing here in the elgato wavelink software yeah things would be so much nicer however elgato gives you something at least by letting you can have this kind of control using your stream deck but pushing buttons to adjust sliders it's not as intuitive as it might seem it's something like i said but having fader control over it would be absolutely nice i'll also link a video down below where somebody did get one of these devices working in conjunction with the elgato wavelength software however it's not as clean as you guys would hope like the fader won't move the on the device won't move the fader in the wavelink software however it does control the volume going into it effectively doing the same thing so that is something you guys might want to check out if you do want some kind of a hardware fader control of the elgato wavelength software sliders one more thing i really wanted to talk about too is that the capacitive mute very nice function because i love the fact that it doesn't really like have a click noise when you do that because most microphones with some sort of a mute button on it will have a loud click every time you do that and this is nice because it's just a little touch to do that extra cool is that when you touch it you get a little red light along the volume knob button here and speaking of that knob here we can also push the button down to i can control how much volume is going into my headphones like right now i can now like i don't hear myself but i'm going to turn it back up and then i can go to how much i hear of my mic versus what i hear through the computer monitoring so the crossfade essentially i like to leave that one in the middle though nice balance is good and then you you can tap it over and even control the volume of the microphone all right here now i'm lower and now i'm higher but i'm going to go back down to here and there we go let's get back up to the main shot and we'll talk a little bit more about this so elgato sells other accessories that can be paired with this microphone including their own branded boom arms they have a low profile sort of under monitor boom arm as well as a tall hanging down over monitor type of boom arm as well so you have some flexibility to choose what works well for you of course this is also compatible with the cheap boom arms you see all over amazon so if that works for you more power to you with all that being said i have to say at what this microphone costs it's got really stiff competition can you find better sounding mics in its price range you sure can't but remember what i asked at the beginning of this video i asked if the wave mics are the main event of their total package to that i answer a resounding no the microphone alone at 160 bucks isn't a great value however once you factor the power of the wavelength software the story changes in a big way it changes in such a way that the software alone makes this package one of the best purchases any streamer can make what a giant swing that took right so let's try something now let's get this video to 500 likes and i'll give one of these away just make sure to drop a comment down below let us know how this mic can improve things for you and will select a random comment to win if you like this video you know what to do hit that subscribe button and that bell so you don't miss a single upload also i stream on twitch every friday at 8 pm pacific at twitch.tv coalition gaming crew so feel free to stop by drop a follow and let's talk tech hopefully you found this video useful educational helpful or otherwise informative my name is chris and i've been your stream technician peace also we've got a bunch of other videos over here including a lot of related stuff to microphones stream tips all sorts of stuff you want to click one of these you do you really do because you know you do right you're still here okay bye

Channel: Coalition Gaming

Views: 73,435

Keywords: coalition, games, crew, gaming, computer, pc, build, review, tech, coalition gaming, pcmr, budget build, linus tech tips, tutorial, how to, build video, obs ndi, twitch, streaming, best mic for streaming, elgato wave 3, lewitt, elgato wave microphone, wave xlr vs goxlr, wave link software, wave link software free, wave link software alternative, korg nanokontrol2, wave link and stream deck, wave link software setup, wave 1 vs wave 3, how to make your microphone sound better, elgato camlink

Id: odAttD2PBEs

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021