Hands-on with the Elgato Wave 3: Your next streaming mic

Conveniently, the Wave 3 comes with the stand attached, allowing you to yank it free from its cardboard cocoon and get straight into the setup process.

‘Setup’ is a strong word for the two-minute process that comprises plugging the mic into a USB port, then downloading and starting up Elgato’s Wave Link software.

You don’t need the software to benefit from the Wave 3, but we highly recommend it, as it’s a quick and convenient way to make on-the-fly changes to keep that stream running smoothly.

But we’re not here to teach you how to stream, we’re here to tell you why the Elgato Wave 3 is going to be the next addition to your streaming setup.

Design

Elgato has a history of sleek, elegant, and functional product design. We’ve seen similar design language shared between the Stream Deck, lights, and cameras.

This is carried across to the Wave 3 mic too. The mic itself is a rounded-off candy bar shape measuring 153 x 66 x 40 mm / 6.0 x 2.6 x 1.6 in.

This makes it compact enough to either position directly in front of you on the stand or attach to a mic arm or boom pole.

The Wave 3 uses a standard thread, making it a 5-second job to mount it. Additionally, it comes with an adapter to make it fully compatible with the majority of audio boom arms too.

Elgato has also equipped this mic with all the necessary hardware controls, meaning that you don’t need to open any software to make adjustments during the stream.

At the heart of these controls lies a multifunctional dial positioned front and center. This allows you to adjust input gain, headphones volume, and crossfade between the PC mix and the mic.

There’s also a capacitive mute button positioned on the top, within arm’s reach to quickly slap in the case of an emergency interruption by a loud roommate or embarrassing family member. The light around the dial also goes red when you’re muted, so you know when it’s safe to resume.

Around the back we find a 3.5mm Audio jack and the USB Type-C input, allowing you to manage the cable behind the desk, or along the cable routing on a mic arm.

We received both the black and white variants of the Elgato Wave 3 and they both look fantastic. The black one lends a stealthy tone to your setup, whereas the white one looks more like a fashionable centerpiece.

Overall we like the white one more as the color contrast between the main body and mic grill produces a pleasingly contemporary two-tone look.

Performance

Elgato has outfitted the condenser mic with a cardioid polar pattern. For the uninitiated, this particular pattern is well suited for clear voice pickup while minimizing unwanted background noise, provided that you’ve positioned the mic correctly, that is.

During our period of playing around with the mic, we found its performance to be fantastic, not only for simple streaming uses but for regular old voiceover recording too.

The mic produced recordings of superior clarity, with very little unwanted background noise. It even managed to mostly remove mouse clicks and keystrokes, which are a particular bane of any streamer looking for clean audio.

It’s worth mentioning here that you can enhance the performance of the Elgato Wave 3 with their official Wave Link software package. This allows for more adjustment and troubleshooting than either Windows audio mixer or the controls on the front, we’ll talk about the Software momentarily

If you want to further improve the Elgato Wave 3, you can use the threading on each side of the main body to attach it to a shock mount and throw a pop-filter over the front too.

The shock mount will insulate the mic from impact noises, for example running a gaming chair into your desk at pace, and the pop filter will help to prevent breathing noises that can arise from being very close to the mic. Both of these are available for purchase over at the official Elgato website.

Elgato Wave Link software

As we said earlier, you don’t need this to use the Wave 3, but it’s recommended anyway in order to get the most out of the mic and tidy up all your audio sources.

In a world of Razer Synapse, Corsair iCue, and SteelSeries GG, Wave Link is a breath of fresh air. There are no odious ads, no enforced updates, and no features hidden behind paywalls.

Additionally, you can import any number of VST3 plugins to further the Wave Link experience, this allows you to add sound effects, voice modulators, instrument noises, and more.

This sort of open software is what we like to see. Other brands would have you locked to their curated selection of plugins, and have them only worth with their products and software. The more open the software, the better, and Elgato have done a great job in this regard.

Elgato Wave 3: Final verdict

The Elgato Wave 3 is a fantastic piece of compact, easy-to-use, and high-performance streaming kit. The mic quality is sublime, the software is intuitive, and the mounting options are versatile enough to allow compatibility with any audio equipment, regardless of brand.

Additionally, investing in the Wave 3 mic is a great way to enter into the Elgato ecosystem. This is a particularly good streaming ecosystem to be a part of as it allows for centralized software and hardware control.

This is far easier than mashing together 5 different brands and hoping OBS or xSplit can make sense of it all. It’ll also help you avoid having to simultaneously use 5 or 6 different peripheral software suites, and we all know how annoying that can be.

Overall, if you’re in the market for a new streaming mic, the Wave 3 is a great choice and we fully recommend it.