Photograph: Henri Robbins
The microphone comes with a basic desk-mounted stand in the box, which uses two rubber grommets and a felt panel underneath to isolate it from the desk. While I was initially worried about this picking up resonance from typing, the isolation mount and noise cancellation settings manage to make it sound normal even when placed directly next to a keyboard.
Hanging the microphone from a boom arm definitely doesn’t feel as natural as the stand, but it is entirely possible with the threaded hole on the underside. The headphone jack’s placement on top is inconvenient, and the microphone feels incredibly long when hanging from above. The screen’s display can be flipped 180 degrees, though this means the adjustment knob is now on top of the screen. When using the knob, your hand will likely be in the way of both the display and the proximity sensor, which can be a bit annoying. The microphone is designed to be used with the included stand, but it’s still entirely usable with an arm as well.
Impressively Hands-Off
Photograph: Henri Robbins
The most impressive part of this microphone was how little I had to do when using it, since the automatic settings are so dialed-in. During my entire time with the microphone, I didn’t need to adjust the gain at all. Outside of specifically testing functionality, I didn’t even have any reason to open the Logitech G Hub app. All of the important settings are able manage themselves entirely from the microphone itself.
The automatic gain control on the microphone is fantastic and requires basically no input outside of very fringe instances. The system has a proximity sensor to determine your distance from the microphone, which it then uses to determine the input range and angle. At essentially any distance, I found the microphone to pick up my voice and normalize it to an acceptable volume, albeit with some audio quality degradation at longer distances. Namely, there are some issues with echoing and loss of midrange frequencies, resulting in a more hollow sound overall. But the loss is fairly limited.
Similarly, the noise reduction works fantastically. The de-noiser has four levels total, ranging from “none” to “maximum.” The higher the de-noiser setting is cranked up, the more muted and claustrophobic sound. With the setting at maximum, I was able to place the microphone behind my mechanical keyboard (which is all-aluminum with no foam, meaning it’s LOUD) with zero interference or noise, as opposed to setting the microphone between myself and my keyboard. On the other hand, at lower levels, the microphone was able to completely drown out a quieter keyboard or farther-away background noise with no issues. That’s seriously impressive.
Semiprofessional Quality
Much like the original Yeti, the follow-up uses a cluster of three directional capsules, with the different settings adjusting the relative sensitivity of each. The directional functionality can swap between standard front-facing sensitivity with three degrees (standard, focused, and hyper-focused), 360-degree pickup, and an “interview” mode that listens on either side of the microphone. There’s also an option for Stereo mode, which separates the left and right levels from the front. However, I found that this mode struggled to pick up louder or higher-pitched directional noises, with claps or snaps registering on both sides equally. This is not a huge issue, but ASMR fans beware.
Opening up the microphone, it appears that two of the clusters are facing towards the user at 45-degree angles, while the third is facing away from them. This explains why the stereo mode only works for the half of the microphone facing the user and doesn’t have 360-degree coverage. Besides this, the construction of the microphone is incredibly simple, and the entire microphone can be disassembled in a few easy steps.