The Elgato Wave Neo is designed to make you sound better on work calls, but it could be a solid budget mic for streamers if wielded correctly

When Elgato announced its Neo line in 2024, it felt like an interesting shift for the brand. For the first time, it wasn’t directly chasing content creators and a slice of the premium market; instead, it looked to be going after a broader, more everyday audience. The Elgato Wave Neo is the microphone in that range, so it almost feels strange to consider it against the best microphones for streaming and gaming.

It’s a compact USB-C condenser that’ll set you back $89.99/£89.99 and boasts the simplest route to good audio as its defining trait. It's a very different proposition from the rest of Elgato's mic lineup. Where the excellent Elgato Wave:3 MK.2 leans hard into creators wanting studio-grade vocals with onboard processing, and the Wave DX speaks to the XLR crowd, the Wave Neo is seemingly aimed squarely at those with money on their mind.

I’ve spent a couple of weeks with it and ended up using it mostly in a way I wasn’t expecting.

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Design

The Elgato Wave Neo is a cute little thing, a pill-shaped microphone with a white plastic shell made from more than 60% recycled material. If you've seen any of the other Neo products, you'll immediately see the familial resemblance. It comes with its own weighted metal base, an extension bar, and a pre-installed black foam pop filter that clips onto the top. If you’d like a splash of color, you can also grab one of five pastel alternatives, but they’ll set you back an extra $14.99 as an add-on, rather than being an actual color choice. In the box, you also find a braided USB-C to USB-A cable with a molded connector, and that's your lot.

The Wave Neo is understated enough to sit on your desk without demanding too much attention, and with a base footprint of just 9cm, it doesn’t take up much space either. The weighted base keeps it planted, and there's a neat cable guide on the back of the riser for tidying the USB cable away, and you can build the stand with or without the riser, depending on how close you want the mic. If you’d rather keep it up and out of the way, it supports 1/4", 5/8", and 3/8" mounting threads for a mic arm.

There are a couple of rough edges that feel a bit un-Elgato to me, though, and not just because this isn’t trying to look like the brand’s other best live streaming gear for gamers. The connection between the stand and the riser extension is loose and wiggly. It doesn’t actually have anything to secure it firmly in place. Admittedly, once it's assembled and sitting on the desk you don't really notice, but it leaves an underwhelming first impression, and I can almost guarantee at some stage you’ll go to move it and pull the top half clean off. The seam where the foam pop filter meets the mic body, right around the central LED, is also a tad rough. Again, it’s me being picky, but the Wave Neo just lacks the precision I’d usually expect from an Elgato product, even a more budget-friendly one.

The front is dominated by a large tap-to-mute button with an LED that glows white when in use and turns red when muted. It's bright and hard to miss, and for a mic that's going to spend most of its life used in work calls, knowing your mute status at a glance is a nice thing to have. You can dim it through Wave Link if it bothers you, but I actually opted to ramp it up to the max. Around the back there's a 3.5mm headphone jack, though this isn't for direct mic monitoring like you’ll find on the Wave:3; it's purely for listening to your computer's output.

Features

On the inside, the Wave Neo is running a condenser capsule with a cardioid polar pattern, and it’ll record at up to 24-bit/96kHz with a frequency response of 20Hz to 20kHz. For the price, that's actually a solid spec sheet; I’d even go as far as to say it’s overkill given the intended use case. Nobody needs 96kHz on Discord or Teams calls.

Physical controls are limited to the touch-sensitive mute button on the front. There's no gain or headphone volume dial, so if you want to adjust anything like that, you're doing it through software. The mute button is certainly sensitive. On top of deliberate taps, I was even able to get it to activate by knocking it with the top of my MacBook Air’s screen while testing positioning. Thankfully, because it's on the front edge rather than the top, like on the Wave:3, I didn’t find it prone to accidental touches.

Elgato’s Wave Link app is where the Neo picks up a couple of features worth knowing about. For most people, the big win will be Voice Focus, Elgato's AI-powered noise cancellation, which I found to be effective at filtering out distractions from within your space. It’s worth noting this is a device-powered feature in the app, rather than anything happening onboard the Wave Neo itself, so if you're planning to use it purely as a plug-and-play mic, you’ll be missing out. For anyone working from home or in an open-plan office, I'd say it's well worth the download.

Beyond that, you get a low-cut filter, the ability to adjust gain and LED brightness, and you can browse the Elgato Marketplace for extra filters and effects. It’s worth noting that the Wave Neo predates the new Wave FX Processor you’ll find inside the likes of the Wave:3 MK.2. That means despite both mics running through the same Wave Link software, you’re locked out of most of the new effects and app features like VoiceTune.

Performance

A quick glance down Elgato’s product page for the Wave Neo tells you everything about who it imagines this mic being for. This isn’t being presented as a gaming or streaming mic. It’s not sitting in RGB-filled setups while chill lo-fi beats to study and relax to play in the background; it’s in workspaces and bright desk setups.

So that’s how I approached it. I tested the Elgato Wave Neo away from my usual streaming setup, using it in my dining room and my work office across Teams calls, Discord, and general day-to-day productivity.

When it's properly positioned, not too far away, and with a bit of mic etiquette, the Wave Neo sounds impressively clean and punches above its price class for audio quality. It’s pleasant for vocals and a massive step up from what the in-built mic in my MacBook was capable of. The roomy echo of the hard-floored dining room vanished and there was real focus on my voice instead. It can't match the Wave:3 MK.2 for detail and natural richness, but for calls and casual voice work, it's a perfectly nice listen.

It’s heavily dependent on proximity, however, because move out to 30cm or so away and the quality drops off noticeably. It’s not that the Elgato Wave Neo suddenly sounds bad when you’re not in exactly the right spot. It’s just that if I leaned back or positioned it just above my laptop screen at arm’s length, I’d go from sounding objectively better in every way to simply less echoey than the in-built mic. This is a microphone that rewards good habits. Speak into the front of it, keep it close, and it delivers. Forget where it is, and you’re still ahead of where you would be with a laptop mic, but you’re not getting what you paid for.

Elgato may not directly pitch it as an accessibly-priced option for streamers, but I could see the Wave Neo doing a respectable job there too with the same level of care. Gamers aren’t spoiled for choice under $100, and while there are certainly much better options not too far out of budget, I think the Neo would hold its own. The kind of EQ massaging and DSP filtering that comes natively to more expensive mics will be a manual task here. But given the raw input is pretty clean, there’s no reason a new creator couldn’t end up in a strong spot to get started before upgrading down the line.

Should you buy the Elgato Wave Neo?

The Elgato Wave Neo does a good job of what it sets out to do. It's a simple, clean-looking USB mic that'll make you sound noticeably better on work calls than whatever's built into your laptop. Add Voice Focus through Wave Link, and it becomes a solid option for anyone working in less-than-ideal environments. It's easy to set up, compact enough to live on any desk, and Elgato’s continued commitment to using recycled materials is always a bonus.

Where it's harder to get excited is on true value. At $89.99/£89.99, the Wave Neo isn't expensive and doesn’t have too many alternatives to compete with, but it's not cheap either. You’ll also need to train yourself into proper mic etiquette and arrange your setup appropriately to make sure you’re in a position to get the most out of it. The Elgato Wave Neo isn't really trying to compete as one of the best mics for streaming and gaming, though with some care and attention, it’s ready to go live. As a work-from-home mic that should have you sounding better than anyone else on the call, it's a solid if unspectacular pick.

How I tested the Elgato Wave Neo

I used the Elgato Wave Neo for a couple of weeks, choosing to test it away from my streaming setup to better reflect what I believe is its target use case. This included Teams and Discord calls from my dining room and work office, general productivity use, and dedicated audio testing at various distances. I tested it both as a plug-and-play mic and with Wave Link enabled, including Voice Focus. All testing was done on the included desktop stand.

For more on how we test, take a gander at the GamesRadar+ hardware policy.

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