// WIRED US/UK — GAMING
Logitech Yeti 2 Review: An All-In-One Studio Setup
The original Blue Yeti microphone was first released in 2009, and it remains the most ubiquitous microphone for home recording 17 years later. Chances are, if you’ve watched a YouTube video, Twitch stream, or listened to a podcast, you’ve heard (and probably seen) this microphone at least once.
Long after absorbing Blue and phasing out the brand name, Logitech has finally released its highly anticipated successor: the Yeti 2. The follow-up maintains the same general shape and look but drastically changes the microphone’s functionality. Instead of simply recording audio, the Yeti 2 has a handful of features to monitor and manipulate the audio passing through it, seamlessly recording production-quality audio with zero delay. While some of the design feels a bit underdeveloped, the Yeti 2 is a deserving sequel to the iconic original model and an easy shoe-in as the best USB microphone you can buy.
The Yeti 2's biggest upgrades stares you directly in the face after taking it out of the box. The built-in screen and dial allow for on-the-fly adjustments right on the microphone. No software required. While I was a skeptic at first, I quickly found this little screen to be significantly more convenient than the alternative. It can be used to adjust gain, enable different post-processing settings, and configure the sound profile of the microphone.
More importantly, the screen can quickly provide insights into audio quality at a glance. The main screen shows a graph of the gain-adjusted input volume, which is what the microphone is sending to your computer. It can also display a histogram of volume over time, a pattern to show what direction input is coming from, or … a pixel-art Yeti. This little guy looks confused when you’re quiet, happy when you’re talking at a normal volume, and alarmed when you’re too loud for the microphone to handle. Within the G Hub app, the icons can be swapped out with any of Logi’s other premade avatars (a dragon, flower, frog, or jellyfish), or freely customized with your own images using a simple drag-and-drop menu. This is the least functional feature of the microphone, but it’s an endearing and intuitive way to indicate audio quality at a glance.
The screen also has quite a few adjustable menus for different features, including a de-noise function with four levels, five EQ presets, a pattern customizer with eight default options, and a multitude of toggleable settings to clean up and improve recording quality. While the settings can’t be customized using the screen, the G Hub application provides more in-depth adjustments for how intense each of these settings are, along with explanations of how they work and when to use them.
The microphone comes with a basic desk-mounted stand in the box, which uses two rubber grommets and a felt panel underneath to isolate it from the desk. While I was initially worried about this picking up resonance from typing, the isolation mount and noise cancellation settings manage to make it sound normal even when placed directly next to a keyboard.
Hanging the microphone from a boom arm definitely doesn’t feel as natural as the stand, but it is entirely possible with the threaded hole on the underside. The headphone jack’s placement on top is inconvenient, and the microphone feels incredibly long when hanging from above. The screen’s display can be flipped 180 degrees, though this means the adjustment knob is now on top of the screen. When using the knob, your hand will likely be in the way of both the display and the proximity sensor, which can be a bit annoying. The microphone is designed to be used with the included stand, but it’s still entirely usable with an arm as well.
The most impressive part of this microphone was how little I had to do when using it, since the automatic settings are so dialed-in. During my entire time with the microphone, I didn’t need to adjust the gain at all. Outside of specifically testing functionality, I didn’t even have any reason to