Rich sounds that pass the audition

Yeti USB Microphone From €131 ★★★★★

This week, I lost count of the number of video calls I made. I’ve spent hours online staying in touch with colleagues and family using a variety of apps like FaceTime and Microsoft Teams.

I’ve never been particularly happy with the call quality from standard PCs or laptops, so I ordered a stand-alone, good quality USB microphone, the Yeti, from Blue Microphones.

There are smaller, and cheaper USB mics but I liked the build quality of the Yeti and the promise of home-studio quality calls.

The Yeti is a beefy gadget and stands almost 30cm tall. It weighs a full 1kg with its stand attached. The stand is included, but it can be detached for fitting to an arm if you have a fancy home-office or studio set-up.

Connecting it to your PC is a snap and it simply plugs into a USB socket. Once plugged in, a small red LED illuminates and you know there’s power. However, a push button for muting when pressed will flash that light so you know the status of the microphone.

As well as the USB socket on the mic, there’s also a standard 3.5mm earphone jack. This allows you to plug headphones in so you can hear what the mic is picking up. This is a great feature on a consumer microphone and allows you to check the quality and background noise before you make your calls.

The Yeti has a couple of additional switches. There’s a gain dial so you can adjust the input level, and a pattern selection button. I chose the cardioid setting, which is the best for one person talking in front of the microphone.

It was crucial that I got the settings spot-on as my first call was a live interview with Matt Cooper on TodayFM.

Listening back to the interview podcast, the audio is rich, balanced and had no peaks or clicks.

While it is a beast of a PC microphone, its features and build quality leave competitors in the dust, and it passed its first test on live radio with flying colours.

‘Its features and build quality leave rivals in the dust’