Perfect Quality, Steep Cost – Shure MV7 Podcast / Streaming Mic Review
It’s almost frustratingly common to trade a whole host of features in exchange for an improvement in a singular area. Some of those tradeoffs are somewhat impossible to design around – if you want the fastest trackday car, it’s not going to have much in the way of luggage space – but some are much more artificial. In the world of desktop microphones, the ones us gamers are likely to be familiar with are ones like these – the Elgato Wave 3, the Blue Yeti, even the HyperX Quadcast. These are all plug and play, pretty versatile and some are incredibly feature rich, but compared to this, the Shure MV7 – what you are hearing right now – they frankly pale in comparison, at least in audio quality.
The MV7 is a somewhat different genre of mic compared to this lot, it’s definitely more into the “pro-sumer” or even “professional” market, rather than these which lie much more squarely in the consumer space. It’s not just a USB condenser mic with a standard electret capsule, it’s a dynamic mic with both a USB output, and a clean feed going to an XLR jack. You can use this just like any other XLR mic without the USB cable attached, or just use it like any USB mic without ever looking at an XLR cable, or be extra special and have it outputting to both simultaneously.
The other big difference, as I’m sure you’ve heard already, is the quality. For comparison’s sake, here is the Elgato Wave 3 recording at the same time. I’ll leave a note on screen so you can see which it is you are listening to, although I think you’ll work it out yourself pretty easily. The Shure, despite technically being lower spec’d with its 48kHz maximum sampling rate compared to 96kHz on the Wave 3, sounds markedly better. Even if the Wave is in the same close-to-the-mouth arrangement as the Shure, it still doesn’t reproduce my voice quite as well, and that’s before you start fiddling with the XLR output which provides an unprocessed output you can capture with a dedicated recorder or interface.
What you’ve been hearing is over USB, using their ShurePlus MOTIV app – emphasis on the word ‘app’ there as it’s rather obvious this is an Android app repackaged to work on desktop, but not redesigned at all. The app has either “Auto Level” or “Manual” modes – you’ve been hearing “Auto Level”, with the “Mic Position” set to “Near”, and the “Tone” set to “Natural”. This has been the best collection of settings I’ve found thus far, although if you are more enthusiastic you can switch to manual and adjust the mic gain – the same thing as the on-device controls change – along with one of four EQ profiles, flat, high pass, presence boost, or high pass & presence boost, enabling the limiter, and setting the compressor to off, light, medium or heavy.
You might be wondering both why I have an XLR cable connected and why I haven’t shown you that audio yet. The reason is that thanks to this being a dynamic mic you need to pump the gain really, really high. The 36dB the USB connection peaks at is arguably not enough, and while the Zoom H5 this is connected to can clearly boost it to mostly high enough, it loses some of the quality it should otherwise be benefiting from. You almost always need something like a Cloudlifter, alongside a high quality interface, to make the most out of this style of mic.
And that brings me nicely to one of the bigger drawbacks, the price. At MSRP this thing, with it’s little Manfrotto tripod, will set you back £269. Now happily you can pick up the mic without the tripod – which I’d recommend although I’ll cover that in a sec – for more like £180. Now that isn’t so unreasonable, the ‘street price’ is about £60 more than the Wave 3 and if you are serious about streaming or running a podcast I can see that being a worthwhile investment. The catch is, if you want to use this via XLR, in theory the way to get the best quality out of it, you’ll need to spend the £180 on the mic, another £150 on a Cloudlifter, and another £100 on an interface like the Focusrite Scarlett Solo or 2i2, which takes it from a £200 investment to closing on £500.
So, odds are the majority of MV7 buyers will be sticking with USB and “settling” for the still fantastic, but not complete, performance. Luckily when using it over USB you do get some extra benefits. The built in controls, all of which are capacitive touch sensitive areas, allow you to control the controller’s gain, the headphone output volume, and mute the mic with a single tap. In theory this is great, but in practice the execution falls a little short. The touch controls weren’t consistent for me. Sometimes it would register my press, other times it wouldn’t. That can be frustrating – and that is compounded by their location. They are on top of the mic, inset into the band where the mount attaches. When using the mic in any position other than tilted downwards (covering your vision), the lights and controls are facing away from you, making you crane yourself round to just see if the mic is muted or not.
And while I’m talking about the design… Why, in 2022, is this using micro USB? On a mic with it’s outputs on the back and a mount that tries to snap them off if you try to rotate it, why include a fragile, insecure connector? They even include a USB C to micro USB cable in the box, so they clearly know USB C exists and is useful, they just didn’t fancy putting it in the device too.
When it comes to the little Manfrotto tripod, I’m left feeling pretty underwhelmed. I’ve been using Manfrotto tripods to film these videos for something like 8 years, the quality is always exceptional and they always work well. This though? It’s awful. While the legs do swing out with a nice smoothness, the release button is impossibly stiff – enough to dent my thumb from the force required – and the ball shrieks when moved with a crunchy feel. I get it’s clearly machined with what resemble 3D printed layer lines to help the locking mechanism hold it firmly in place, but does this sound like a quality product? Because it sure doesn’t to me.
It’s also a bit of an odd design. Thanks to the long stem on the microphone’s mount, when resting on a desk as intended it’s very tall. It’s taller than any other mic I have, and what’s worse is if you try and make use of the ball head on the tripod to bring it closer to you, the tripod is too small to support the weight (at that height) and can just fall over. That seems like a strange oversight.
What’s also strange is the insane amount of plastic Shure include in the packaging. The mic comes in a plastic bag – which didn’t even stop it from getting marked – the tripod comes in a plastic bag, a piece of cardboard used to advertise their software has a piece of tape on the back making it harder to recycle, AND THAT PIECE OF CARDBOARD COMES IN A PlASTIC BAG! One of the USB cables came in a bubble wrap plastic bag, where the other came in a plastic bag three times too long. In a world where our oceans are chocked full of plastic we didn’t need, why needlessly create more like this?
The final thing I want to mention is placement. With most USB mics, like the Wave 3, they have a pretty wide range for their placement. Want it on the desk half a metre away? Cool, just turn up the dial. Want it right up in your face? No problem, just turn it down. But with the MV7, it pretty much has to be attached to your lips to get good quality. Even with the gain still set to its maximum +36dB, if you are more than just a couple inches away it’s incredibly quiet, and using it on your desk at the same half a metre is, well, unusable.
Despite its flaws, it’s hard to argue this isn’t an exceptional microphone – at least in its audio quality. The versatility of both USB and XLR output will be useful to some, and the ability to get £1000 worth of audio in a £180 plug-and-play device is nothing to be scoffed at. It’s just a shame that there are a number of strange quirks and decisions that make this a clear tradeoff between ease of use and additional functionality, and outright sound quality. The frustrating thing is that doesn’t need to be the case.
Shure could have used USB C instead, designed a mount that works a little better both with its I/O and for desk mount configurations, allowed for a higher gain level, made software that wasn’t just a mobile app ported to desktop and iterated on the touch controls design to make them more reliable and visible. Hell, they could have pretty easily implemented Elgato’s ClipGuard feature – all that is is a second ADC built into the microcontroller and a few lines of code to detect peaking on the primary channel and to switch which channel is being relayed. But they didn’t, and that’s a shame.
For the right buyer though, I can still see this being a worthwhile buy. If you already have the processing gear for XLR and don’t want to spend SM7b money, or you care more about the quality than anything else, especially at the lower ‘street price’, I think it’s still a good buy. If you care more about versatility, extra features and ease of use, it might be worth sticking to the more consumer gear like the Wave. I’ll definitely keep using this, although I think I’ll need to work out a way to use a boom arm instead of this massive contraption.
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TechteamGB Score
