AKG Lyra

I use this for home recording - with a view to trying to improve my playing - mostly sax but also a bit of guitar and mandolin. It makes voice and guitar sound very good but it is very, very difficult to set it up to capture a loud instrument well.

Two big issues - the lack of a dial or read out on the gain is just plain careless and would be easy and cheap to sort out. I suspect it owes more to the visual product design aesthetic than any acoustic idea. This is not a cheap USB microphone and it seems a bit cheapskate to skimp like this on something small but so important. To be clear there will be many situations where a change of gain settings is necessary and where it would be far more convenient to look at the mic than check input levels on the computer - not least because the knob is on the back of the mic and easily moved by accident.

The second problem is something I can hear clearly but have not got the technical vocabulary to express clearly - to my ear it seems to make the sound, particularly of tenor sax, somehow bland and not assertive enough. I guess that that might be desirable for speech and many styles of singing but it takes a lot of the fun out of the sax. It also makes it hard to get a feeling for developing good tone.I think that this is because it is difficult to set the gain at a point that allows for loudness through all the overtones without clipping. This seems strange to me, given that the Lyra is supposed to have an SPL of 129dB - which is a lot louder than an unamplified sax will normally get near.

So while it's probably great for podcasts and singer songwriters it's a questionable buy for loud instruments

Edit - May 2024 - In my initial review I noted that "this is not a cheap USB microphone". In fairness to AKG it is now a cheap microphone - €69.00 - but when I bought it in 2021 its price was considerably higher - €125.00. Nevertheless the comment about lack of a dial still stands.