ROG ASUS Strix Magnus Gaming & Streaming Microphone Review

Conclusion

There has rarely been a product we can sum up as briefly as the ASUS Strix Magnus. Do you want a microphone for streaming/recording that doesn’t require you to wear a headset all the time but, equally, doesn’t take up so much of your desk space that you can’t leave it there all the time? Would you also like the sound quality to be excellent and it to be as happy recording a single person as it is doing a group? Tada. The ASUS Magnus. Problem solved.

What?

You want me to expand upon that?

Okay.

We’ve experienced a Blue Yeti here at OC3D Towers and the sound quality you get from that is excellent, but the size is troublesome. It’s so big we tend to leave it elsewhere and only plug it in when we plan on recording something. That means that there is much less spontaneous recording. The Magnus, by virtue of its compact dimensions, is the kind of thing that we can happily leave on our desks all the time, so it is as good for a planned recording as it is grabbing some off the cuff idea or just recording a voice memo. It’s light too and the inclusion of a robust carry case means you can sling it in your backpack and take it wherever you go, perfect if you’re more into the podcast creation side of things than streaming games or recording a makeup tutorial. 

The settings work very well too, as does the noise cancellation. If you’re someone who types in a manner that makes your neighbours think a elephant has fallen down a marble staircase in a suit of armour then you’ll be delighted at the excellent noise cancellation. Sure it doesn’t completely eradicate room noise, but it manages to dampen it without reducing the broad spectrum of audio recorded. Perfect if you want to record yourself strumming an acoustic guitar or other musical thing without having either a ton of background noise or losing the richness of your playing. It also, more probably, just stops your viewers getting annoyed with the clacking of your keyboard or the squeaking of your chair. You can really tell the difference between the cardoid, stereo and room based recording modes too. Most of us are friendless creatures so we’ll just leave it in cardoid mode, but stereo mode can record a conversation or interview between two people very well too, whilst also negating a lot of the background noise you’d get from just sticking it in room mode.

The only negatives we have are aesthetic things. Like so many audio products the cable port is on the left hand side. 99% of us have our towers on our right, because windows, so this makes cable routing a chore. Secondly the RGB lighting might be great, but all the lighting is at the back. Why? The point of RGB is to bask in the glow of our favourite colour, and if it got annoying in your eyeline there is an off button built in. Seems a curious decision to us. Almost like having the display on the back side of your monitor.

So, as we said at the start, if you’re in the market for a desktop microphone that gives outstanding sound quality without either busting the bank or being so large that you can’t have it on hand at all times, the ASUS Strix Magnus is perfect and will really improve the quality of your recordings and thus popularity of whatever it is that you’re sharing with the world.

  
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