Elgato Wave DX Review

A Closer Look

The microphone looks great, and that’s hardly surprising, as Elgato are one of the leading streaming brands and has consistently put out great-looking products since day one. It’s a pretty heavy microphone too, it has a steel chassis that makes it feel incredibly robust while negating minor vibrations and rattles within the microphone itself.

It has a nice Elgato logo on the front, but this is actually removable too. You can rotate it, put it on the side, or if you don’t want any branding in your stream or you want to customise it, you have that option.

It comes with a mono swivel mount as standard, which looks great, but as you can see, it will require something to mount it to, this is not a stand.

It’s got a good range of adjustment to it, and it’s compatible with pretty much all microphone arms. It has a 5/8″ mount with 3/8″ and 1/4″ thread adapters included.

The microphone uses an XLR output, which has been an industry standard for decades, so your existing cables and adaptors should work just fine. The microphone is completely analogue and was designed in cooperation with Lewitt Audio. Of course, being completely analogue, it requires an XLR interface/amp to operate, which is the perfect excuse to grab this lovely Wave XLR.

This is a lovely-looking piece of kit too, and again, it’s pretty heavy, which is a good thing, as it means playing with the dial isn’t going to cause it to go sliding around your desktop. Much like the microphone, it feels durable and over-engineered, for lack of a better way of saying it, just feels very premium in your hand and to use.

It’s got a lot of great features built-in, despite having a deceptively simple-looking interface; the big dial. It has dual selectable filters to remove low frequencies for close and distant mic positions; 80 Hz and 120hz.

With the dial, you can set the overall gain for the microphone, adjust the output volume, and even use it to crossfade the volume between your media and microphone sources.

Clicking a mute button isn’t something you want to hear on your recording or stream, so Elgato has equipped a capacitive mute button on the top that basically requires a light touch to activate.

Around the back, it’s simple enough, with the XLR input for the microphone, a 3.5mm jack for direct lag-free monitoring, and a USB-C port for connecting it to your computer.

Once hooked up to your PC, you’ll also be able to use the Wave Link software, which adds even more control to the already versatile Wave XLR.

Next up, we have the stand, which looks superb and offers quite an impressive range of adjustability. Now, it’s nothing innovative either, it’s a microphone arm, and that’s hardly something new. However, it does look great, there’s no doubting that.

This is the LP version, which literally means low profile, so its ergonomics are well-suited to desktop usage.

As you can see, I’m able to move it around my desktop area to find an optimal space. This isn’t where I’d mount it, but give me a break, I need it somewhere I can take a picture of it!

Plus, when it’s not in use, I can push it out of the way, freeing up more space for whatever else I’m doing really. The locking ball head is great too, as you can easily adjust the angle to suit your needs.