Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsSmall flaws prevent it from being an excellent product
Reviewed in Canada on March 14, 2022
From a birds eye view, this seems like a great product. The software is intuitive, it’s priced well, and it transmits your voice clearly. But there a lot of small things that ultimately led to me returning it.
1. Mac support. I need a mic for both Windows and Mac, and the Mac app was really quite terrible in my experience. It would constantly crank up CPU usage and eventually crash. The beta version of the app — which is necessary if you want VSTs — is significantly worse, crashing constantly.
2. Voice quality: Generally speaking, it’s very good. But if you are looking for a mic with more low end/warmth in its capture, I would recommend looking elsewhere. VSTs can help alleviate this a little bit, but if you are planning to use this mic on Mac, that’s absolutely a no go currently.
3. Background noise: It’s a condenser microphone, so to some degree this is not easily avoided. But it cannot be overstated that this mic picks up keyboard and mouse noise at extremely loud volumes in my experience, making a gate VST or something similar absolutely essential. Its use when gaming is harmed if you don’t do this, as all your clicking and mashing will be transmitted rather clearly.
4. This is rather egregious, IMO, just on principle: the Wave:3 is advertised as a 96kHz mic, vs the Wave:1 which is 48kHz. When you install the WaveLink software on windows you’ll be defaulted to 48kHz, and need to access a “secret” menu to switch this. I see why it’s secret—doing this resulted in noticeable popping, glitching, etc in my recorded audio which did not occur in 48kHz with the software, or in 96kHz with no software. The fact that the mic cannot run at its advertised fidelity with the software that sets it apart from other mics is pretty questionable, even if 96kHz isn’t going to be necessary for the vast majority of the target audience for this device.
There are many good thing about this mic, like Clipguard and things other reviewers have pointed out, but I primarily wanted to shed light on issues that hadn’t been discussed as much.