AKGPro Audio Ara Professional USB-C Condenser Microphone, Dual Pattern Audio Capture Modes for Podcasting, Video Blogging, Gaming and Streaming, Blue and Silver

As an owner of many snowballs and friends who formerly had them, for $50, by comparison this is a no-brainer. Metal construction, USB C, clear enough audio that people were commenting if i had purchased a podcast microphone, and plug-n-play setup make this a winner in my book. Looking at reviews in the past, i could see why people would recommend it at it's former $99 price point, but at under $50, this is absolutely worth it. Only complaint is that I wish the audio jack and volume control could be used for general system audio instead of monitoring mixed with system audio. When plugged in, the volume control only controls the audio used for monitoring. Not a deal-breaker since connecting to the system itself for system audio is a non-issue.

the best , for zoom , love it

Me encantó

El micrófono es de alta calidad, lo mejor por el precio. Se siente de calidad.El único detalle es que cuando se pone en mute, hace un sonido, lo que puede ser molesto para quien escucha.

The media could not be loaded. This is a well-made microphone; feels sturdy, looks good, and has good sound quality. I bought this to replace my 12+ year old Blue Yeti microphone, mostly because I wanted a USB-C microphone that might (I thought) be better overall. It's a good product, but has a significant flaw for anyone who wants to use it for video calls: when you click the mute button, it's quite loudly picked up by the mic, and worse, un-muting has an audible "thump" sound that comes across very loudly. I only want to use mics with mute buttons in a call (so it's great that AKG included that), but I couldn't imagine doing this click/thump to my co-workers multiple times in a call (I mute and un-mute a lot).In the video recording, you can hear the difference between the AKG and the Blue Yeti: the Blue Yeti's mute click is quieter, but more importantly, there's ZERO sound when you un-mute. So, for me, there's no contest and the AKG mic is going back for a refund.To be fair to AKG, I paid 2x more for the Blue Yeti so perhaps this isn't the best comparison, but if a brand new product isn't going to be better than what it's replacing, what's the point in buying it?

I compared this against the JLab Talk Go and the HyperX SoloCast. The intended use was just for basic voice chat on calls and while gaming, and I wanted something that sounded good (don't need studio quality) both up close and from across the room with minimal background noise pickup resulting in echoing on the other end. While all three mics performed ok, this was the best performer, though at a fairly substantial price difference.For roughly the same price (depending on if it's on sale, the HyperX is either the same price or very slightly more), I feel the HyperX is better than the JLab by a fairly large margin and is the obvious better choice between the two. On top of that, it has very easy and obvious controls, simply requiring a tap on a large button on top to mute/unmute, and even allows you to switch between showing the red light when muted or not. In contrast, the JLab mic has small buttons on the bottom, and switching between modes gives no indication as to which mode it's in other than the color of the light ring, which is both distracting and unintuitive, as you need to remember which color is for which mode. The downside to the HyperX is that it only has a single mode (Cardioid Polar, no omnidirectional), but switching between the modes on the JLab especially but also the AKG didn't seem to make much difference, and for my use I don't need omni.I ended up going with the AKG because it was the best of the three in quality and background noise reduction, but it's almost twice the cost of the JLab and the HyperX (when the HyperX is on sale) and I certainly wouldn't say it's twice as good. It was more than I wanted to spend, but it wasn't a lot so I just went with it. For anybody with a strict budget, the HyperX isn't going to do much worse than the AKG but will be better than the JLab, at least based on my limited testing. Despite going with this one over the HyperX, I gave the HyperX 5 stars and this one 4, because for the price difference I really expected a bigger difference. For pure performance, if they were the same price, I'd rate this higher, of course, but it loses points for value.The controls on the AKG are simple, with a prominent, well-placed two-position rotary switch to select the pickup pattern and a mute button. While not hard to press by any means, the mute button does require some pressure and has a fairly loud clicking sound, which requires either a firm mic stand or gripping of the mic to press the button so the mic itself isn't pushed/moved, and between grabbing the mic and the click of the button, it may be noisier when recording or for anyone on the other end than the HyperX with its touch-sensitive tap-to-mute button.The tests I did were both with Discord and in-game voice chat. Regardless of the mic, the results were always better with Discord, as it apparently has quite good noise reduction and echo cancellation. That said, even the best mic (the AKG) still has some background noise and echo where the other person can hear themselves as well as whatever game, music, or whatever I'm playing. So if you really want to eliminate that, it seems you're going to have to spend a fair bit more. I wasn't willing to do so, since it's not something I plan to use much, and haven't since I bought it, I just want something for the occasion where I want to talk without a headset, and it works ok for that.Newer GPUs by Nvidia and AMD offer noise suppression, which may help make a cheaper mic work better. I couldn't test the mics with those, so if you have them, keep that in mind.I avoided the popular Yeti microphones for a couple reasons: the brand is now owned by Logitech, a garbage company, and, based on reviews, the new version is a significant drop in quality compared to the older one, not surprising with Logitech now at the helm.

Extremely easy to setup & sound translates perfectly without background pickup

Using this for better recording of guitar amps with my phone. Definite improvement. Solidly built.