Upgrading Microphone

The microphone used by Hadronna for streaming on Twitch was the Blue Yeti. This microphone has a great sound, excellent bundled software, and was simple to setup.

Hadronna then got a Yamaha AG03 mixer with the aim to have easier to access controls over various stream aspects as well as add effects (reverb).

This would have been fine except that Hadronna streams games that take voice input. The AG03 combines all of the audio into a bundle and presents it as a whole. So games like Phasmophobia could only see “AG03” which included all of the other computer sounds.

The Blue Yeti could output to monitoring and exclude the computer sounds (game etc), however this audio monitor output is generated to drive earphones, the input to the AG03 was expecting microphone signals. These are similar but not the same. The audio monitor output was far too noisy for the AG03 to handle appropriately.

So the search for simultaneous output microphones turned up a number of dynamic microphones that had an XLR connector as well as USB. This includes:

The Samson Q2u was quite inexpensive, and readily available, a good test to ensure that the simultaneous output would work. However when purchasing this Q2u, the Audio Technica ATR2100X was also available for about the same price (on sale!), so both were purchased – always good to have a backup!

The Audio Technica ATR2100X connected to the AG03 mixer via an included XLR cable, and also connected to the PC via USB-C port. The mic mount supplied with the ATR2100X was garbage, so we swapped in the solid mount from the Q2u kit, attached this to the shock mount + boom arm that was setup for the Blue Yeti.

After 30 minutes of testing and adjusting levels, and another 3 hours testing on a live stream … including many games of Phasmophobia … the only remaining issue we found was a periodic static glitch. This was initially thought to be some sort of grounding issue (periodic?), but was eventually solved with a driver update.

The Blue Yeti is a condenser microphone, the ATR2011X is a dynamic microphone. Dynamic vs Condenser.

If you are researching what microphone might suit your needs, make sure you consult Bandrew’s Podcastage youtube channel.