AKG Lyra

I do have a nice mike locker by now, after 40+ years on outskirts of the muzak business. I do have decent stands, booms, fast clips etc. But recently I get lazy. I'm about to turn 60. I can't be bothered getting mikes out, screwing them in into a universal spider, plugging the cables etc. I'm too old for this. I can take off dust cover from Lyra and plug the USB cable, yes I can. I've tried other similar solutions before, and I do have a portable Zoom recorder with a similar configuration and even more flexible output. Yet again - cables, positioning. No fun. It would be better, if I had more physical space in my walk-in-closet studio, or even a bigger apartment, but it will never happen, will it? This is it. So, Lyra, about €75. Ten pints of some decent ale at a pub? Gives good wide stereo sound, when I want to mike my Tama Pancake drum set, some room guitars, bases, mando banjo balalaikas, violins etc on spot. Maybe even do a guide vocal line. 192 KH s rather useless for me, because my old iMac won't allow the needed 64 latency for more than 1 track, but at 96 it works just fine. Some annoying buffer artifacts show up from time to time, but it's my old weak and dying Intel 3,7 Ghz, 128 Gb RAM, all SSD rack's fault. I'll keep the mike. It's useful.

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.

I've worked as a film maker for many years so I know my way around audio solutions without being an audio expert. I wanted a USB plug and play solution for my MacBook Pro 16 that would do voiceovers and podcasts without the hassle of an audio interface. The AKG Lyra seemed the best fit for my needs after a bit of research, and I was pleased to find out that this was the case. The microphone is robust, nicely designed and has simple, useful features. It has a USB C input on the mic so that can go to the older USB formats or directly to the USB C input on my MacBook. There is also a headphone socket under the mic so, using it with Audacity, for example, I can set the software to both input from and output to the mic unit. The sound quality, as you'd expect from a well trusted brand such as AKG, is super. For me, a good purchase with nothing negative to report.