The best USB microphones of 2021

The Apogee Hype MiC is an interesting, often frustrating microphone. On one level, the mic seems very nice. It comes with everything you could possibly want—there’s a carrying case, pop filter, a whole host of different USB cables for use with all sorts of devices, a tripod, and a tripod mount that can be adjusted to also work with a mic stand.

The front of the mic has a button for adjusting the audio blend in the headset. You can use it to adjust the balance between zero-latency mic monitoring and what you hear in your computer. This is great if you’re recording dialogue, music, or anything else where you might want to hear your recording session. There’s also a knob for adjusting the gain.

The gain control knob can also be pressed like a button to cycle through various compression settings. This is part of what makes this microphone unique. Rather than using the more common DSP (digital signal processing) technology, the Hype MiC has several analog signal processing options that can adjust your tone in the microphone itself with a real compressor.

Unfortunately, not many of these settings are actually helpful. The most extreme setting, called “Smash,” is meant to give a close-up, intimate sound, but in practice, it makes the mic almost unusable as it amplifies the room noise and crushes your voice. At the end of the day, it makes more sense to record the audio without any effects, and apply compression using a computer (if you want to). That way if you apply too much, you can just undo it.

That’s sort of a recurring theme with the Hype MiC. There are a lot of cool features that would be a lot more exciting if they were implemented well. When we placed the included pop filter onto the mic stand, we found that it made it very difficult to get the mic firmly affixed onto the stand.

Likewise, it was challenging to position the pop filter in front of the mic well. The tripod has very long legs, but it’s hard to get them to stay in any position except for the lowest one.

All in all, the mic feels over-engineered in a lot of ways. There’s a whole host of features, but not all of them are useful, either by nature or by implementation.

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