Elgato Wave Neo Review: I hope you got this as part of a bundle

Elgato's stylish, all-white Neo line is designed to be a simple, straightforward, affordable line of plug-and-play (ish) streaming accessories. The current lineup includes five products — a microphone, a webcam, a stream deck, a key light, and a capture card — all priced under $100, except for the capture card, which is $119.99.

The Wave Neo is a simple, attractive white standalone USB mic with a (too) large and (too) sensitive tap-to-mute button, a sturdy-feeling but only half-actualized metal desktop stand, and an interchangeable pop filter (that Elgato sells, optionally, in five pastel colors).

The Wave Neo is small, lightweight, and designed to make you sound good right out of the box. And while it does make you sound pretty good out of the box, it's a bit of a stretch to say it works well out of the box. The Wave Neo is, as it turns out, a pretty good example of how a mic's sound is only one aspect of how well it works.

The Wave Neo retails for $89.99, but we've seen it on sale recently for as low as $64.99. And even at that price, we'd recommend one of our best gaming mics — the Logitech Yeti Orb — over the Wave Neo in almost every situation.

Design of the Wave Neo

The Wave Neo is a small, pill-shaped USB microphone, housed in a white plastic chassis with an interchangeable foam pop filter, a large tap-to-mute button, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The microphone alone — without the stand or arm connected — measures approximately 4.78 inches (121.7mm) high by 2.08 inches (52.8mm) wide, and is 1.68 inches (42.6mm) deep. It weighs just 2.82 ounces (80g), though this jumps to around 6.65 ounces (188.5g) with the swing arm connected. The swing arm, which is metal, measures approximately 3.43 inches (97.5mm) long and attaches to the included stand or a boom arm (it supports 1/4", 5/8", and 3/8" mounting threads).

The black foam pop filter is designed to be easily removable — it's attached to a ring of plastic that you can just pull off to replace. Elgato sells additional pop filters for the Wave Neo on its site for $15 in pastel pink, blue, green, lavender, and light gray. Overall, the microphone feels just a little... cheap. Not only is it made of plastic, the seams around the tap-to-mute button and the replaceable pop filter don't quite line up with each other — a minor detail, perhaps, but this is a $90 mic. Logitech's Yeti Orb — which is also plastic, and retails for just $60 — looks better put together.

Still, it's a nice-looking little mic that will fit better in a lot of setups than aggressively gamer-oriented USB mics like the HyperX QuadCast 2 S.

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On-mic controls are limited to tap-to-mute, which is better than nothing — the aforementioned Yeti Orb has zero on-mic controls. There's also a 3.5mm headphone jack on the back of the mic, just above the USB-C port. The USB-C port is recessed, and the mic comes with a special USB-C cable that fits nicely into that empty space. (It will also work with other USB-C cables, it just won't look as pretty).

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The microphone comes with a sturdy metal desktop stand that consists of a flat, round base that measures approximately 3.6 inches (92mm) in diameter and is 0.31 inches (7.9mm) thick and a riser extension measuring 3.93 inches (100mm) tall. The overall setup — mic, stand, and riser — measures around 11.1 inches (182mm) tall and weighs 1.17 pounds (530g).

The riser extension screws to the base and the microphone simply drops onto the riser. This sounds like it would be very simple, but it ended up being sort of finicky — screwing the riser onto the base was trickier than I expected, as it was difficult to keep the riser aligned with the alignment pin on the stand (okay, this wasn't a major imposition, but it definitely wasn't as "plug-and-play" as an already-mounted mic is). Dropping the mic onto the riser is convenient but not particularly stable — the mic wobbles on the stand and I also kept forgetting that the parts were not screwed together when I picked the mic up to move it on my desk.

In the box, you'll find the microphone and its stand — base, riser extension, and connecting hardware — as well as a 5-foot (1.5m) white braided USB-C to USB-A cable.

Although Elgato advertises this microphone as being "one mic for everything" and talks about how it can seamlessly work on every device from a PC to an iPhone, it comes with a USB-C to USB-A cable — and that's it. So you'll need to get some adapters to plug it into an iPhone — or any phone; I don't think any phone has ever had a USB-A port. But also, you can plug just about any USB mic into a phone if you have an adapter, so this is hardly something notable about the Wave Neo.

Specs

Performance of the Wave Neo

The Wave Neo has a condenser capsule with a cardioid polar pattern that records audio at a maximum sample / bit rate of 96 kHz / 24-bit — hi-res audio, which you won't find on all budget mics (but also isn't too difficult to find on budget mics these days). For example, while our favorite budget mic, the $60 Logitech Yeti Orb, records 48 kHz / 24-bit audio, the $99 HyperX DuoCast records 96 kHz / 24-bit audio and is currently on sale at Amazon for just over $60. Also, this isn't the right mic if you're recording audio where a 96 kHz sample rate will make a difference.

The Wave Neo is a side-address microphone, which means you speak into the side (the front, where the tap-to-mute light is), not into the end (like you do with the Rode PodMic USB). It can be mounted on a boom arm, but it’s more likely you'll use the included desktop stand, which is designed to place the mic at an ideal distance from your mouth when it's placed on your desk / table top.

The stand, while sturdily and solidly built, is also somehow not that sturdy. It's designed to be used with the included riser extension, which screws into the base and uses an alignment pin to prevent it from wobbling or spinning around. This part is fine — the riser secures pretty tightly to the base, though the alignment pin did still allow for a very small amount of wobble. However, once the riser is secured to the base, the swing arm just kind of drops onto the riser, which means more wobble and a stand that keeps coming apart whenever you pick it up to move it. I suppose you can set up the stand without using the riser extension — giving the mic a total height of just under 7.5 inches (190.5mm). However, this is even less stable. Although the swing arm does have a notch for the alignment pin on the riser extension, this notch does not work with the alignment pin on the stand (though it seems like the idea behind the design was that the alignment pin was supposed to work with both the riser's and the swing arm's notches). In other words, if you set up the stand without the riser, you end up with a wobbly, spinning mic and a scratched-up base.

Don't get me wrong — I like the look, feel, and built-in cable clip on the Wave Neo's stand, but the overall implementation made me wish for the Yeti Orb's less sleek, but stabler plastic tripod.

Stand aside, vocals on the Wave Neo sound pretty good out of the box. It's not the best-sounding mic on the market, but it's also not trying to be. Vocals are consistent, clear, and on the warmer side by default, which isn't a bad thing. The warmth adds a full, round, friendly tone to your voice, and is probably what I'd call the ideal sound profile for this type of plug-and-play mic. Side-by-side, it's pretty easy to tell that the Wave Neo is a standalone USB mic and not a headset mic, but it's not necessarily going to be the audio upgrade you may have been hoping for. My colleagues were thoroughly unimpressed with the Wave Neo's sound, stating that it sounded "...like a microphone." Indeed.

The Wave Neo's pop filter is also pretty flimsy, and plosives end up reverberating through the whole mic if you're closer than about 6 inches (152.4mm). The mic has a cardioid polar pattern, which means it only picks up noise from one direction, but it still picks up a decent amount of background noise unless you turn on some software-based noise cancellation.

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The mic has a large, oblong tap-to-mute sensor / light on the front, which is white when the mic is unmuted and red when the mic is muted. The actual sensor area extends past the light, however, so it's easy to accidentally tap the sensor when you're trying to adjust or move the mic (especially if you fumble the mic when you pick it up because you forgot that the stand is in two pieces), but that wasn't a big issue for me. What was an issue, however, was that the mute sensor seemed to mute itself at various times, for various reasons. I couldn't figure out all the situations in which the mute sensor accidentally triggered, but I did notice that it seemed to happen frequently when the mic's USB cable was at certain angles and/or was touching things like cables or my PC case, and also when any part of the body of the mic (even the back) was touching things. This didn't happen every time, but it definitely happened too often — I love a tap-to-mute button on a mic, but I wish I could disable the Wave Neo's tap-to-mute and just mute the mic through software.

There's also a 3.5mm headphone jack on the back of the Wave Neo, which Elgato says is for zero-delay system audio — not mic monitoring. While you can turn on mic monitoring through the headphone jack in the Wave Link companion software, it is software-based monitoring, not direct, zero-latency monitoring.

Features and Software of the Wave Neo

The Wave Neo works with Elgato's Wave Link audio software, which is essentially a virtual mixing studio — pretty useful software if you're streaming or otherwise trying to mix audio sources, but not quite as useful if you're just trying to sound good over a regular video call. However, it does tie in to Elgato's online marketplace, which lets you add audio plugins: equalizers, compressors, de-essers, noise suppression/cancellation, effects, and voice mods.

The Wave Link screen is for the virtual mixer, which lets you add different sound input sources (e.g. microphone audio and game audio) and mix them together to create a balanced, stream-friendly output. While this main screen is mainly for mixing audio inputs and monitoring outputs, this is also where you'll find the option to mute the mic and add effects. You'll need to open up the mic's settings, however, to do things like check for firmware updates and adjust the mic's gain, headphone volume, and LED brightness.

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As usual, I have some issues with this software. First, it's a hassle to set up. To install it, you can't have any compatible Elgato products plugged in (which isn't that much of a hassle, I suppose, but is an unusual requirement), and it requires a restart once it's installed. But second, and more importantly, it doesn't always fully recognize the products — the Wave Neo would show up in the software (the software can only be used if you have at least one eligible Elgato product plugged in — just, not while you install it, apparently). But I found that I often wasn't able to adjust any of the mic's settings or mix audio unless I restarted the software and/or unplugged the mic. Also, this was, luckily, the extent of what I needed to do to get it working — I did a cursory search when I first encountered the problem and saw that Elgato's own customer service advised an AppData reset.

Bottom Line

The Elgato Wave Neo is a compact, plug-and-play, budget-friendly USB mic that sounds pretty good out of the box. It doesn't require any software tweaks, though there is, of course, Elgato's companion Wave Link software for those who are looking for more control. The included stand works a lot better in theory than it does in reality, but the good news is that this is a very small, very lightweight mic that you can mount on any dirt-cheap boom arm from Amazon without issue.

That said, the Wave Neo retails for $90 — though we've seen it on sale for as low as $65 — which is closer to mid-range rather than budget-friendly. So, unless you've already bought into Elgato's ecosystem (the Wave Neo does work well with Elgato's other streaming products, such as its stream decks), the Logitech Yeti Orb is a better option: It also sounds great right out of the box, and it retails for $60 but can be found on sale for around $50. The Yeti Orb lacks the Wave Neo's hi-res 96 kHz sample rate, but neither of these mics are what we'd recommend for recording hi-res audio anyway. It also lacks an on-mic mute and a 3.5mm audio jack, but the Wave Neo would probably be better without the on-mic mute (and it would be the same without the audio jack, which is for system audio — not direct monitoring).