Top 5 Gaming / Streaming Microphones of 2020!

what's up guys i'm random frank p and today we're continuing our top five peripheral series of the year with the top five gaming and streaming microphones from 2020 and to make it interesting we're gonna break it up into three different categories really one which is what i think the best microphone on a gaming headset then we have the budget category and then the more expensive sort of options here on this list but either way all five in terms of microphone quality sound really really good and they're some of the best like i said this year that i've tested so if you want to check any of them out i have it all listed for you in the description down below and just disclaimer please make sure you're wearing headphones so you can hear the actual you know best audio quality that you're going to be getting from this video and all my tests are going to be raw and unedited unless noted otherwise for comparison's sake now starting off i'm actually using one of these microphones right now for this entire intro and the microphone i'm using only costs 50 dollars that is gonna be the razer siren mini so let's start off with that so yes for just 50 dollars this is definitely setting the bar high as you could hear because this sounds incredibly good for that price point and honestly it's just downright shocking i'm really not even being dramatic like you can hear for yourself how good this sounds for just 50 bucks in terms of the actual build and the quality itself i like how it's a super small and simple sort of just capsule pretty much very tiny and compact so it's not going to take up much room in your desktop at all it does come on the included flexible stand it's kind of like a ball head so you can angle it just to pick up your vocal pattern the best and in terms of options as you can see we have it in black here but it's also available in white and pink like the other razer peripheral color options now inside is a 14 millimeter capsule that is super cardioid so the pickup pattern is going to be very precise in picking up what's going on right here and with that super cardioid pickup pattern and the actual condenser they use it gives you a very flat response so your voice is going to be just very accurate and true to your natural tone and what we're going to do for all these tests before we head back to the pc and do more in-depth testing is a quick little sound test with an actual keyboard in the background to emulate that gaming and streaming sort of situation where your keyboard is by your microphone so we'll see how well it does at picking up the keyboard sounds with this super cardioid pickup pattern and the keyboard i'm using is the hyperx alloy origins core tkl with their aqua switches that are tactile so they're not super clicky like blue switches and they're not linear and quiet like red switches they're kind of the best of both worlds uh which is why i picked this so i'm just going to be talking you know doing some typing and stuff again you're playing some games you're chatting with your friends you're typing on your keyboard you're gaming you're having a good time maybe you're having a bad time this like i said just to give you an idea of how this microphone does at picking up that background noise now we're head back to the pc and do a little bit more in-depth testing okay so for this next portion what we're going to do is do a quick little mic test and show you the just background noise floor when complete silence so you can get a general idea of pretty much just the general area of your desktop and that includes with my pc in the background so you can hear how it does with that and that has i believe seven fans in my pc so we'll be able to judge how it doesn't picking up at that just real quick uh yes for this entire you know at the pc portion i made sure in my sound settings that all sound enhancements were turned off by default and that the highest possible bit rate and sample rate was turned on in the sound control settings uh this is possible of 16 bit 44.1 kilohertz to 48 kilohertz sample rate so now real quick let's do that for you this is a mic test for the razer siren mini for 50 one two three sibilants one two three sibilants okay so just honestly judging from that quick little sound test here and seeing the noise floor at the end very very impressive and naturally this mic was hidden when i was talking between negative 12 and negative 16 decibels which is definitely what you want because that way it's not going to be close to peaking you can always enhance it afterwards but sounds really good and that noise floor extremely low usually hitting between 59 and just you know negative infinity decibel so it does a really really good job with eliminating background noise and again pc right here seven fans going and you can see just pretty much picking up nothing nothing audible at least so really for just fifty dollars i am super shocked and surprised at the actual sound quality we get here from the razer siren mini and i've tested other razer microphones in the past that have been like quadruple the price of this and honestly this is their best sounding microphone for just 50 bucks super super impressive here okay next up for just 60 dollars we have the new hyperx solo cast microphone which is pretty much like the little brother smaller version of their very popular hyperx quadcast so here much more affordable and again as you can hear sounds very good now there are no four different pickup patterns like we had on the quadcast here they're cutting it down to the basics with just this cardioid pickup pattern it has a few extra things like a touch sensitive mic mute button up top and a red little led on the front which will just be constant when it is active then when you want to mute it you press the button up top and this will blink red to let you know it is muted so like we saw on the siren mini uh the included stand here is pretty small and tiny which is by the way why i have these mics propped up if you didn't quite get that just so it's more in line with my mouth so yes a smaller stand one thing i do like about this is you can actually tilt it 90 degrees sideways and it makes this very satisfying clicking sound as you do but obviously you can remove this from this included stand and use this on your own mic arm if you want and flipping it over on the bottom side there is a thread there is a 5 8 inch thread for adapting this to whatever stand or arm you have then like we did before with the typing test in the background i feel like this is probably even going to be a little bit over dramatic in a sense because when you are gaming you're not constantly pressing down like you are when you are typing like this this is more of like a typing test because when you are gaming you're really only pressing what three four keys at once if you're in like a heated scenario like an fps but you're moving all the time so this might be a little bit louder than your average you know situation while gaming but again just to judge how it does at eliminating the background okay so same story now with the hyperx solo cast we are at the 48 kilohertz sample rate at 16 bits which is the highest possible sample rate this goes and the electric condenser mic inside with the cardioid pickup pattern is gonna be you know the main capsule inside for this so again quick little mic test and background test this is a mic test for the hyperx solo cast for sixty dollars one two three sibilants one two three sibilance okay so one thing i want to point out from that quick mic test we did is this is naturally a bit of a louder microphone i actually had to turn the gain down around six decibels because otherwise it was definitely hitting around like negative one negative two so it was very close to peaking and being too loud so i did turn it down a little bit just to make it more uh natural and not as loud for you guys so keep that in mind you will probably have to adjust the gain once you get it in but it's also going to depend on where you have this situated in front of your mouth and how you have it mounted and also noise floor again because it is a bit louder it was hovering between i'd say uh minus 45 and like minus 48 so then once i did lower it again we were getting around minus 50 decibels uh but yeah again not too bad all things considered uh just a little bit louder so do keep that in mind okay so next up at number three obviously breaking into the new genre here we started off with those two budget mics now we have the gaming headset microphone this is the drop in sennheiser pc38x this retails for 169 and obviously it's going to be a bit different than your normal desktop microphone because this is really the best of both worlds this is one of my favorite headsets of 2020 and honestly i think this is one of the best sounding microphones i've heard on a headset and the reason i'm including this is because obviously with just a separate desktop microphone you still need to have headphones with a headset it's both in one and these sound phenomenal i'm sure you're familiar with sennheiser the quality here is crazy the sound is so so good coming out of these they're also open back so you get a very very wide sound stage and even though 170 is pretty pricey for a headset this is like end game headset if you pick this up you're never gonna need another gaming headset in the future that's just my honest belief i absolutely love these and like i said it also has a really really great sounding microphone so we're gonna head back to the pc do the sound test there obviously okay so now you're hearing the mic for the drop in sennheiser pc38x you might be thinking to yourself like oh it doesn't sound that good but i want you to keep in mind this is after you just heard very good sounding desktop separate microphones so this for a headset sounds very very good even though you know compared to those might not sound like it for a gaming headset this i believe is one of the best sounding mics you can find on a headset it's just very natural and full which is you know what you want out of your headset and what you want out of a microphone and i know you might not believe me but please go back to my top five gaming headset of 2020 video that was what maybe two weeks ago at this point and you can hear out of all those top headsets of the year this microphone i believe is the best out of all of them so you can hear how they sound stacked up to each other back to back to back of other headsets even though here in this list it might not stack up that well to dedicated desktop microphones they want to point that out now the actual mic they're using here is actually bi-directional and is an electric condenser mic but it does have noise canceling built in so it is going to be picking up pretty much what's going on right here and right here behind it but with their noise canceling built in pretty much trying to eliminate that so since we didn't get to do it at the actual desktop behind me i have the same uh keyboard here and we'll just do a quick little typing test and stuff again just so you can judge how it does at picking up that background noise and my voice at the same time now like i said just remember keep in mind this is not really being fairly compared in this test i understand that uh but for a dedicated mic this or for a dedicated headset sorry i think this is just one of the best out there another test real quick this is a mic test for the drop in sennheiser pc38x headset for 169. nice one two three sibilance one two three sibilance and okay just judging that dead noise floor as you could hear with a background noise elimination has in this mic uh there is practically zero there is nothing going on you can hear in the background nothing that's audible at least so that's very very impressive and again just for the price of this overall headset as a two-in-one microphone and gaming headset pretty much absolute top of the line i think okay so for this next one we're gonna stay right here at the pc for the rest of this testing because these next two pretty much require us to be at our pc they also involve some software to a degree so right here at number four is the elgato wave three this comes in usually msrp from 155. i've seen it the last week for around like 140 even so price on this is fluctuating this is the you know more premium version of their wave one microphone this one has a few extra features so first off up top is a touch sensitive mute button on the bottom here there is a dial and there's three different things you can do with this one is for controlling the gain of your actual microphone the second is for actually controlling uh the monitor mix if you want to plug in like headphones to monitor your audio you can adjust the gain for your headphones as well then the third is sort of a mix of that so you could balance out your voice and the actual of what you're hearing from your headphones so if i'm plugged in you know playing some games and i have the actual pc audio coming to the mic i can then monitor the and balance the sort of levels of that so you have some really good features with this built in and i like the fact that you just have that you know dial right here i'm showing you the three different pretty much options you can control and this is what the wave 1 does not have so with the wave 3 you're getting that upgrade with the actual real-time controls here right on the front and i will note that the actual shock mount and pop filter is additional i believe they're 40 bucks each something like that so these do not actually come with the actual mic so the main thing about this is let's just say the main selling point to the wave and the wave 3 is the wavelink software the wavelength software is really really cool and it's a great tool for gamers streamers pretty much anybody doing anything with this mic so i'll be showing you the wavelength software in more detail in just a second but first about the actual capsule they're using inside this microphone it is a 17 millimeter electric condenser mic and has a cardioid pickup pattern that's you know the main thing you're gonna see with a lot of these microphones and it's actually possible of doing 24 bit 96 000 hertz recording sampling so that means you're pretty much getting double of the traditional 48 uh kilohertz which is pretty crazy now are you going to be using that you know for streaming odds are probably not 48 is the standard 48 it's gonna be just fine but you do have that capability of 96 kilohertz for you know podcasting or you know maybe even going in further and editing your microphone and your quality from that you have more you know room and more quality with that higher sample rate but odds are you'll be using this at just 48 kilohertz so back to wavelink okay this is really special so as you can see right here in the software the wave 3 is you know what i'm talking into you can see it there real time but underneath you have two separate icons this is the monitor mix which is what i would be hearing out of my headphones then this is the stream mix which is what you can output into your stream and that's where it gets really interesting when you start to tie it to obs and any sort of streaming software is you actually have up to nine different sort of channels and inputs that you can add into the wavelength software this makes it so you can do different submixes for different channels so for example right now you're hearing me if i wanted to add you know just say a game uh back in that you go into there you add a game and then in your sound settings you tie it to that actually real quick i just deleted the music input to show you real time so you would go to an audio input we can just say again music if you want some background music going on and then you go to the sound panel button which will bring up your sound settings go down to spotify for example and then for the output you tie this then to wavelink you gotta find then just wavelength music so let's see where where'd it go let's try that again you go back to wavelink and then wavelength where is music down here okay so now what you see over here is the actual spotify going in the background so then if i want to turn it up and just be blasting it on my end you can see this is going this is playing music in the background but i don't hear that you know why because then i turn headphones down so i don't hear what's going on with this background track you can do this for pretty much anything but the stream hears it now for example if i wanted to keep this same thing going but not have the audience hear it you know for example if it was something with like copyright music where i want to be playing some tracks but i don't want the background or i don't want the the audience to hear that so i don't get a copyright strike whatever i can have it so i'm listening to it 100 and the stream is listening to it at zero percent and then you can go in and balance you know what you hear whether it's the monitor mix or the stream mix and then tie each of those mixes to different channels for your outputs for streaming or whatever it was a pretty rough you know quick example of the software itself but that is the main selling point to wavelength it's the fact that you have all these different sub mixes that you can go in and balance and sort of mix up what you hear versus what the audience is hearing all real time you just have a ton of flexibility now now we'll do that you know sound test again like i said before uh with the actual dead noise this is the mic test for the elgato wave 3 microphone for around 150 1 two three sibilants one two three sibilants okay so you heard that and real quick we will do the typing and uh gaming tests for you so you can hear the actual background noise now of the keyboard versus my voice when i'm talking uh all that kind of stuff but yeah we will judge that background noise floor test in just one second all right so for that test overall not too bad it does seem to be hovering um around like negative 53 and negative 56 anywhere between there for that background noise but again you have that flexibility then to on the fly just change up and maybe lower your gain or adjust it because you have those built-in controls here so for 150 you're getting a pretty good sounding microphone capable of being you know processed more and bit edited more with that 96 000 hertz uh sampling rate but the big thing is again wavelength software and the actual just on the fly controls so that's gonna be the main selling point here that's gonna be why people want this because wavelength gonna make your life a lot a lot easier and honestly 150 really isn't too bad for the overall package you get with this okay then last but not least we have the shure mv7 this retails for 250 so the more expensive option on this list but for the total package this is my favorite microphone of the year for a lot of reasons now sure is a very popular company and this microphone is a pretty unique so first off not only am i over usb recording onto my pc but via xlr i'm also feeding this into my camera so i can record two different channels at once is everybody gonna need to do this no but for this exact situation where i'm testing this and giving you different examples of how they sound versus these simple outputs it works great it works perfect so for this portion i'll bounce back and forth and show you visually what you're listening to but yes you have both xlr and you have the usb audio connection uh to plug to your pc which can also use their motive software so before we get into that stuff uh right now let's just go over real quick the features so first off this does come on this yoke pretty much but it does not come with a sand or an arm this is not an arm that i already have i'll drop it down below so you can check it out but yes it does not come with one you just get the microphone and this little stand or the uh the yoke right here now you also have which is pretty interesting uh some built-in controls up front you can't see it at this angle probably but you do have a touch sensitive pretty much a gain dial so you can swipe it up and down you can mute the mic on the fly so i like having those touch sensitive controls just right here in front of you so that way when you're gaming and streaming if you don't have you know mic levels already pulled up on your pc you can see here up top if you are peaking just turn it down real quick a little swipe of a finger movement you know what i'm saying okay so one of the things i really like about this is the the mode of software gives you a lot of different flexibility when it comes to actually changing up how the mic sounds because you do have some different eqs and different options with the moto software so for example real quick this is just the auto levels when you plug it in when you don't download anything this is just the auto level this the stock sound signature of the mb7 this is at the near and the natural setting and of course you can also go in and mute it here if you want and adjust the monitor mix but what i really like is the different tones they provide so for example now i am on the dark tone for the near mic position setting and for my voice i think this complements my voice um probably better because i do have say naturally a deeper voice so when you add the dark tone to it i think it gives you that real cinematic sort of sound that i prefer again back to natural this is going to be kind of just yeah i would say a more natural sound and it's a good in-between spot between the dark tone and now the bright tone so this bright tone right here uh what this does is it kind of really obviously just sounds stupid but it brightens it up it gives you sort of more clarity and sort of more detail in your voice uh so yeah between those i like i said i really like dark uh but you can also go far so for example say you know i don't want the microphone right in my face if i am gaming or streaming and i want to just sort of add some separation between myself and the actual mic uh you have the far the far setting to do that and we're currently on dark i think in this situation at the far setting uh natural is what sounds the best by far just because it does a good job of again mixing the different tones and adjusting and compensating for the distance away from your mouth so again natural and far then real quick over to bright which still sounds pretty good um i would pick definitely natural or bright over dark at the far setting but i think natural sounds best at far and then bringing it back to us for near again near and dark sounds really good this is all just on the auto level so now if i want if i want to go to the manual settings up here we have a few more options there's different options for adjusting the monitor mix your mic gain you have some built-in eq so right now we're on flat there's also a high pass filter a presence boost and both a high pass and presence boost just to show you that real quick for the actual just manual adjustments again i didn't adjust gain or anything yet but this right now is the high pass and presence boost if you want you can throw on a limiter and also you have compressor options from light medium to heavy so i'll just throw on light real quick so you can start to get a difference if we were here going over every piece of this software and doing a mic test for each dedicated you know manual setting we'd be here for hours so just again show you real quick what you can do with manual versus the auto auto levels near and dark so you have a lot of flexibility but like i said i think right here is where it sounds the best and you still have that option to either plug in via usb or again right then right over to the actual an xlr if you have like an audio interface or like this to a camera you have so much flexibility with this microphone and for 250 i think it is hands down an absolute steal so now then real quick i will type and i'll be doing some testing and typing and stuff and just for example real quick when i said type i saw this peak a little bit which is an added benefit of that little screen on the front i definitely have some pretty aggressive plosives with my mouth so it was really useful to be able to see that peaking in real time so if i want then i can go in and adjust the gain yes okay now we're going to do a dead noise background test this is the mic test for the shure mv7 microphone which retails for 250 dollars this is plugged in via xlr into my audio interface from audience the evo 4. one two three sibilants one two three sibilants and now for an additional comparison with still the mv7 this is now the usb connection instead of the xlr to our audio interface so that before was the more stock natural sound this over usb lets you use their motive software this is the stock natural and near sound settings you can hear how this sounds again just compare the tonal differences between them and also we'll do the mic floor test as well so one two three sibilance one two three sibilance yeah and uh honestly just judging from that real quick as you can see in real time when i was doing that this pretty much wasn't moving at all i think out of all of them um well i think probably the pc38x did the best i eliminated the background noise because it has an active noise cancellation in it but for the actual uh dead noise just again no distortion in the background no nothing and it was hovering anywhere from between minus 58 to just minus infinity so a great job at still eliminating any background noise and having a very very silent nose nose floor you can do that more so the noise floor is what i meant to say so yes this the shirt mv7 again more expensive but you just have so much flexibility and the software here not very complex very simple and user friendly it's for the price i think it's very very hard to beat all right guys so for a quick little recap before we wrap this up with our top five gaming and streaming microphones of the year three different genres starting off with the two budget microphones with the razer siren mini and the hyperx solo cast then we had this sort of two in one exception with the headset dropping sennheiser pc38x and then the more higher end options for a gaming achieving microphone with the elgato wave 3 and then the different sort of more premium option with the shure mv7 and honestly for whatever sort of budget you're looking at and what you want to spend on a microphone we've got you covered from 50 to 250 and in their class in their genre that came out in 2020 i think these five are hands down some of the best you can buy whether you want just straight out of microphone quality or the option to use software and enhance it and eq it you have the options here so i hope this video helped you out and i hope it makes you you know make a better purchase decision next time you want to pick up either a new headset or a new gaming and shooting microphone as you venture into 2021 maybe you're looking to stream full-time so yeah hope this helped you out if i did give this video a big thumbs up show your support and feel free to follow me on twitter at randomfrankp and lastly if you haven't already hit that subscribe button i hope you all enjoyed have a good day

Channel: randomfrankp

Views: 944,766

Keywords: randomfrankp, 2020, 4k, top 5, best streaming microphone, best streaming mic under 100, best streaming mic under 50, microphone for youtube videos, mic test, sound test, microphone for twitch streaming, microphone for twitch, microphone for podcast, microphone for gaming, gaming microphone, hyperx quadcast, razer seiren mini, hyperx solo cast, shure mv7, pc38x review, pc38x, elgato wave 3, wave 3 microphone, pc38x mic test, pc38x microphone, USB, XLR, audio interface

Id: 6CU347TSE54

Length: 27min 16sec (1636 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 12 2020