The Best First Mic

The first mic I ever bought was awful. It was a Razer Seiren X, which had good reviews, but I hated it. First of all, it's a Razer product—and I've never been recommended anything Razer besides the Razer DeathAdder. I've never had good experiences with anything from Razer, and the Seiren X was no different. It had a plethora of shortcomings. The audio quality was mediocre at best. It took a lot of fiddling and filters to get it to sound even halfway decent. On top of that, it’s not shaped well and doesn’t come with a pop filter. I didn’t want to buy the official Razer pop filter, so I picked up a general pop filter instead—which worked fine, but it was still an extra expense. Don’t even get me started on the Razer software. It’s a nightmare.

The worst part about the mic was the number of settings I had to tweak and the filters I had to add just to get it to sound okay. For a microphone that costs over $100, I shouldn’t have to spend hours figuring out how to make it work properly right out of the box.After about a year, I’d had enough. I did more research and grabbed a Shure MV7 on sale for $175 and that was the best decision I made for my setup.

This mic has been great since the moment I unboxed it. With support for both USB and XLR, it offers the best of both worlds. The software is super easy to use. And if you’re not using a USB headset, you can even plug directly into the mic with an aux cable and control your system audio using the physical slider on the microphone. That’s a unique feature! The last bit of praise I’ll give this mic is for its look. It fits perfectly into any setup or home office. My only gripe after getting this mic is that I didn’t just go for the Shure SM7B.

It's the industry standard for podcast and streaming microphones. It looks great, too. But where the MV7 really shines is in its ease of setup. The SM7B is XLR-only, so it requires a better understanding of both hardware and software to set up correctly. If you're looking for a great mic at an affordable price with a painless setup, go with the MV7. If you’re more experienced, have used a mic before, and want a real upgrade, I’d say save up and make the leap to the SM7B—it’s worth it.

Hope you got something out of this. Thanks for reading!