Shure MV7 vs. Blue Yeti -- Which USB microphone should you choose? (audio comparison)

the blue yeti is one of the top recommended podcast microphones for beginners and although it's still a great option the shure mb7 which is what i am using here is one of the newer picks that a lot of people have been asking me about so today i wanted to compare the blue yeti against the shure mb7 i also want to bring in the shure sm7b which is the microphone used by a lot of the top podcasters to do a few audio tests between these two mics and talk about which one i would recommend for different podcasters and online business owners hey i'm melissa and welcome back to whit and wire where we help creators turn their skills and passions into profitable online businesses and since i've had podcasting courses for years and i'm the host of book smart and the whit and wire podcast i get asked about microphones all the time as in it is the number one trafficked page on the whit and wire website and i rank on the number one page on google which is wild today i really thought it'd be helpful to show you an audio comparison between the two mics because they are a pretty different price points the blue yeti is usually around 120 while the shore mb7 is around 250. so since it's double the price i really want to explore the differences between the two and let you hear the difference to see if you can hear a difference first let's take a quick look at the blue yeti so the blue yeti is a usb microphone which means that you have a cord that plugs from the bottom of the microphone directly into your computer and there are some dials on the back where you can control the gain and the setting of the mic one of the interesting things about the blue yeti is the fact that it has those different settings but the one that you'll want is the one that looks like this lima bean it's called the cardioid setting and that's the one that only picks up sound from the front of the mic which is what you want when you're recording a podcast the other settings to give you a comparison are things like omnidirectional which means it would pick up sound from all around the mic but again for podcasters cardioid is the setting you'll want then on the top we have the gain dial which you'll adjust in either direction and i do recommend doing some sound checks to see what fits your space gain is your microphone's way of picking up either more sound or less sound that's the best way i can describe it so if it sounds like it's really intense if it sounds like your voice is cracking and it's painful almost to here that means that your gain is too high but you may go too low and then risk not hearing your voice at all it'll sound way too quiet so you'll have to test it out in your own space to hear what's right for you on the front we also have a couple more buttons the mute button does exactly what you think and if it's blinking red you are muted and then the volume dial actually controls the headphones if you have headphones plugged into the bottom of the mic that controls how loud you hear the audio but it doesn't actually control the level of the recorded sound so to quickly differentiate gain controls what the recording sounds like while volume controls how loud you hear it in your ears so adjusting the volume dial does not affect the recording itself when we get into the audio demo you'll see me add a pop filter to the blue yeti and that eliminates some of the popping p sounds it's called a plosive and just having that screen in front of the mic makes a huge difference so if you do have a blue yeti i would definitely recommend spending the 15 to 20 dollars to get a pop filter moving on to the shure mv7 if you take a look at the back of the mic you'll notice that there are three inputs a headphone jack an xlr cable and a micro usb cable the mv7 comes with the cable that connects the micro usb into your computer into a usb port so you don't have to buy that separately but it is worth mentioning that if you are a mac user or depending on the computer you have you may also need to purchase an adapter so that you can plug it into your computer the interesting thing about the mb7 though is that it also has this xlr cable so although you probably wouldn't be using both at the same time you have the option to either treat this as a usb microphone or as an xlr microphone an xlr does require an additional piece of equipment called an audio interface so instead of plugging an xlr cable directly into your computer which doesn't work you would plug that cable into the interface where you have some additional audio controls in the same way that we saw with the blue yeti things like a gain dial and a couple other things depending on your interface but then there's a second chord that plugs from the interface into your computer that's an extra piece of equipment that may not be right for most people tuning in trying to evaluate which mic is right for you so for the sake of this video and for the audio demo i'm going to treat both of them as usb microphones what's cool about the mv7 is that when you use it as a usb there are actually some touch sensors along the mic that you can use to increase the volume to switch the settings or to mute that i think are really nice because they don't make a sound when you use the blue yeti if you want to click the mute button it does make a little bit of a sound so i think that those are some nice additions to the mb7 and the reason why they don't matter if you're using the xlr cable is because the audio interface that second piece of equipment would be the place where you control the mic itself another interesting element with the mv7 is the fact that when you do use it as a usb microphone it actually comes with free software from sure called sure plus motive where you can adjust some additional settings so in a traditional xlr microphone the audio interface would be your control center with different dials but in the absence of that interface shure has inserted this free software almost as the middleman so you do have some additional controls and i will bring those up during the demo in just a second but before we do the demo i wanted to talk about the differences between the mv7 and the short sm7b when you compare the mv7 and the sm7b next to each other they look really similar they both have a metal body they both have a yoke that you can use to attach the mic to a boom arm but when you take off the windscreen that's when you can really start to see that the microphone itself looks very different so don't be fooled it's not just that the mv7 is a smaller microphone it is a completely different microphone with a totally different build now speaking of the windscreen as a pro tip i found thanks to the wonders of youtube you can purchase the sm7b windscreen for about 14 and the quality is a lot higher than the windscreen that comes with the mb7 and the pro tip that i found is that the sm7b windscreen does a much better job preventing plosives so that upgrade for me has been totally worth it and that's why i did end up deciding to purchase the mv7 instead of the sm7b i really hope i'm getting all these acronyms right throughout the whole video but if not i apologize the other aesthetic difference between the two mics is that the mb7 has the shore logo along the side while the sm7b does not and i think more interesting than just saying oh yeah one has a logo one doesn't is that i think this gives a nod towards shore's intention for who should buy each mic the mv7 was positioned as a mic for podcasters for youtubers and for streamers and so i think sure is putting their marketing front and center because they had a feeling that this mic might be on video so respect more power to them but i think that again beyond just the obvious can you see the logo or not it is a hint at who they think is using this microphone between the two shore mics the mb7 and the sm7b i don't believe that most beginner podcasters or online business owners need to take the splurge into the world of sm7b buying that second piece of equipment the audio interface and then potentially buying even more equipment to boost the sound so i would recommend that for the purpose of our demo we are really deciding between the blue yeti and the shure mb7 but obviously if you want to splurge your little heart out i will not be the one to stop you clearly i own more microphones i know what to do with so i'm not in a place to judge now let's change this setup a bit to see if we can do a side-by-side audio comparison of the two microphones okay it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to set this up but now we have the blue yeti mounted on a puzzle with a candle on top of it you can hear me switching back and forth right now i am using the blue yeti talking a little bit more in this direction so you can hear how it sounds and now i'll angle a little bit more to the mb7 to hear if there is a difference you can let me know in the comments if you hear a difference between the two i won't know until afterwards when i listen to the recording but when i listen i definitely hear that the mv7 just sounds a little bit warmer for lack of a better term and my recording space is very quiet but when i've been in other spaces that are more echoey the mv7 tends to still sound a little bit nicer while the blue yeti just picks up every single echo and the sound of every single breath so a small pro tip i will share is that if when you're editing your podcast you feel like you're constantly just editing out the sound of you breathing one editing hack would be to upgrade your microphone because a nicer microphone doesn't have that harsh breathing sound in the way that any 100 ish microphone will sound we've done a little bit of a back and forth here but i also want to pull up the sure plus motive software to show you how you can do a little bit of extra stuff with the mv7 to give you the comparison though with the blue yeti there's no additional software but i could change the gain on the back so as i'm changing the dial you should be able to hear a pretty significant difference and then i'm changing it back towards the middle and now the gain is much higher i'm going to turn it back down but you can hear that that gain dial definitely has an effect on blue yeti but now let's switch over our setup to do the software demo okay now we have the sure plus motive software open which again is free with any shore microphone and this is where it starts to get really interesting because while the blue yeti has the gain dial on the mic this is shore's response to how they can keep this microphone updated even as small new updates come out so we are using the usb settings this will only work if you're using the mic as a usb but you can see we have some auto levels and then the option to manually adjust levels if we scroll down just to give you a sense of some of the tools here we have two mic positions near and far so i'm on the near setting and if i move back here probably can't hear me too well but if i use the far setting you should actually be able to hear me a little bit better so i think this is really interesting for streaming for youtube for anything where you may not want to be right up on the microphone so that's some added flexibility that the yeti doesn't have i'm going to switch back to near and come in a little bit closer we also have some preset features called tone right now i'm using the natural tone i'm going to switch over to dark this is what i think the sm7b is really known for like a rich dark tone a warm quality to the voice i think you'll really hear it when i go over to bright bright sounds totally different i'll be honest i don't really know who's going to use the bright setting i think most of us will choose dark or natural but now you can see how this microphone can really evolve to fit different tones appropriately let's go back to natural switching over to the manual settings you see a ton of additional options here we have the gain so this is the equivalent of the dial on the blue yeti so if i turn this down you should be able to hear a pretty clear difference between where it was before and here let's move it back up a little bit this sounds probably a little bit more appropriate we could play around with that for a while let's set it around here and then we'll scroll down to the eq the limiter and the compressor if you don't feel like audio engineering is your expertise you can just stick with the auto settings but i think that the limiter is helpful to know that if you regularly like top out or you feel like your gain feels kind of screechy the limiter can help with some of those things what i'll say as a tip when you're running a soundcheck is that right now i'm talking at like a pretty even tempo with a pretty neutral voice but when we do interviews especially we tend to laugh or we react and we get a lot louder so i would do some testing with the limiter on versus off to see how it sounds when you get excited and then the last noteworthy slider is compressor right now it's off but i'm going to switch it all the way to heavy this is where you should hear a difference again i feel like the sm7b is known for having like higher compression and i'll switch it back so you can hear the difference here i am just talking where the compression is now off there's no right or wrong it's mostly about what you prefer so the takeaway from using this sure plus mode of software i hope is that you can play around with the different settings to see what sounds best on your voice using this microphone now that you've had a chance to hear both it comes down to the ultimate question which microphone should you choose i really don't think that there's a better or worse option but because they're at two drastically different price points i think the blue yeti is probably a fit for somebody who's just getting into podcasting you're dabbling a little bit maybe later on you would upgrade to the shure mb7 the sm7b or any other incredible microphones available for purchase but what i like about the mv7 is the flexibility with the near and far mode the ease of choosing a tone instead of manually adjusting gain and eq and so i think this could be a great mic for somebody who does podcasting but potentially also video or youtube because this is the mic i use in my youtube videos i didn't buy a separate mic to go with my iphone which is how i'm recording this video i decided to use what i already had so i plug this into my computer with that usb cord and then i sync the video and the audio file together i also think that the mv7 was the right choice for me because i had already been podcasting for a while and my ears know too much like i can hear every little breath and there became a moment where i would listen to myself in blue yeti recordings where i felt like i could just hear every single echo and i was spending all this time editing out breaths which you do not need to do but because i had hit a point where the podcast was doing well enough and i felt like my ears had become maybe sensitive to the way that raw recordings sounded i knew that upgrading to any different microphone in the like 250 to 400 tier would make a huge difference where i could save time editing and that was a huge tipping point for me the fact that i could use it for youtube was just a bonus i would love to know in the comments what microphone you use or if this was a helpful comparison between the two options and if you're looking for my full list of current microphone recommendations you'll find a link in the description or you can visit whitanwire.com microphones and since you're already here here is the next video tutorial that i would recommend for you

Channel: Wit & Wire | Course Creation Tips ✨

Views: 20,743

Keywords: shure mv7, blue yeti, podcast microphones, best microphones, blue yeti vs shure mv7, microphone comparison, microphones 2021, blue yeti mic, shure mv7 mic, shure microphone, best podcast tools, audio quality comparison microphones, audio quality, microphones for podcasts, shure mic, yeti mic, podcast launch strategy, podcasting essentials, youtube recording essentials, course creation essential, USB microphones, Best USB microphone, Shure SM7B, Shure SM7B vs Shure MV7

Id: F8wmq9MC1hU

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 01 2021