The Best USB Microphone

The built-in microphones on most computers don’t do your voice justice—they pick up too much room noise, add too much fuzz, and dull your warm and natural speaking tone. A standalone mic connected via USB will help you sound your best, whether you frequently sit in on conference calls or record podcasts. After testing more than 30 USB microphones over the past eight years with the help of audio professionals, we’ve found that the Blue Yeti is still the best microphone for most people.

The Blue Yeti has been our pick since 2013, coming out on top during every retest of available microphones. In our latest brand-concealed, sample-based test with five panelists, including a professional audio engineer, all five experts ranked the Yeti’s recordings at or near the top because it produced clear, rich-sounding recordings and preserved our speaker’s natural vocal warmth. This is a microphone that both amateurs and professionals turn to for their voice or music work, and one that will last for years.

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Of all the microphones we tested, the Amazon Basics Desktop Mini Condenser Microphone did the best job of capturing clear vocals while cancelling all other non-voice sounds. All five of our audio experts ranked this mic in their top three, with two of them even choosing it as the best. (One panelist had it in a tie with the Yeti, saying the Amazon Basics was better suited to spoken voice, while the Yeti was the one to buy for capturing ambient sounds and instruments too.) The newest version of this microphone adds a second, omnidirectional sound-pickup pattern to better capture more than one voice, as well as a headphone jack, headphone volume control, and microphone gain (volume) control—it’s a significant upgrade over the previous version of the mic. It doesn’t feel as durable as the Yeti, and it isn’t as compact as the Shure MV5, but it can make your voice sound vastly clearer than any computer mic would.

If you’re looking for a portable mic—or one that doesn’t hog too much desk space—the Shure MV5 is a better option than both the Blue Yeti and the Amazon Basics mic. In previous testing, all our experts ranked the audio samples recorded with the MV5 on its vocals preset in their top three, with one audio engineer rating it the best. When unscrewed from its stand, the mic is about the size and shape of a billiard ball; it’s hardly noticeable on a desk, at least not any more than a big paperweight is. In addition to connecting with computers, it can plug directly into an iPhone or iPad (but not the USB-C iPad Pro or Android devices). Although it doesn’t have the additional sound-pickup patterns that the Yeti does, the MV5 remains a fine single-voice microphone. Its small size makes it much easier to pack in a bag than the Yeti, but that also means you’ll have to figure out how to prop it up to match your speaking height.