Elgato WAVE:3 review - Introduction

Elgato Wave:3 review
A New Wave in audio recording

And now for something completely different, we broadcast something completely different. Aimed at the streaming community and creators with a demand for high-quality audio and functionality, meet the Elgato Wave:3, Elgato being subsidiary and owned by Corsair of course. Elgato is known for its broad selection of anything related to streaming and streamers. Handy helpful hardwrae and software combinations to switch feeds, audio, or recording/streaming in 60P/4K, of course being lit by your Elgato Key Light Air (review). As you can observe, the entire streaming infrastructure needed is provided mostly by this company. The Elgato website has been teasing Project Wave for a while now. The teaser showed a suspected microphone with an integrated volume knob, which, allows multiple audio sources to be controlled separately.

If you want to stream, podcast, or record gaming videos for YouTube/Twitch, one of the first steps is picking up a good microphone as they are able to offer that extra bit in audio quality and control you need to be a live content creator. There are plenty of options on the market, the latest one comes from Elgato. USB microphones have become more apparent in recent years, so there are a lot of choices out there but will come with a reasonably hefty price tag and are generally more difficult to set-up (they often require some sort of external interface) rather than a USB model. For example, the microphone can be used to turn or turn up/down game audio, music, and voice chat separately. By itself that doesn't sound very extraordinary, but you do get added functionality at the reach of a mouse-click. You can mix and define your audio streams as this USB driver MIC has some core logic and software applied to it. That means a suite of software that allows you to (LIVE) define your MIC volume, Gain, but not just that as the software will even allow you to mix in music or the audio from say your gameplay footage. And that function alone made us a bit interested in as to what is we're dealing with.  The WAVE:3 also is seamlessly integrated with other Elgato gear like the stream deck.

So in short, a stream MIC with added mixing and audio source teaming functionality. Oh hey, and it looks pretty as well.