Product Review: Yeti X World of Warcraft Edition

Product Review Yeti X World of Warcraft Edition

About a month ago I was offered a review sample of Blue’s latest product in their yeti line, the Yeti X World of Warcraft Edition. I’ve had the microphone for about 3 weeks now and have played numerous TTRPG sessions with it, so it’s about time I wrote a review.

It’s fantastic.

I absolutely love this piece of equipment. It’s a high-end microphone yet still user-friendly. Its exceptional sound quality has single-handedly elevated my group’s VTT experience.

I won’t lie, it’s not cheap. At $200 it’s by no means a spur-of-the-moment purchase, but it’s undoubtedly worth every penny.

Since it’s nearing the holiday season, here are my thoughts on this fantastic product to help sway you in the direction of purchasing such a high-end microphone.

Yeti X World of Warcraft Edition
I just love how sleek it looks. I mean you also can’t go wrong with a black and gold color scheme, but I’m a bit biased in that regard.

Ease of Install & Use

I’m a complete novice at setting up sound equipment. I just plug in all the cords and pray that everything works. It’s gotten me this far in life so, must be an effective strategy.

What’s wild is that I did exactly that and my yeti worked perfectly.

Well, until I realized I wasn’t supposed to have the top of the mic tilted toward me, but that’s why we read the instructions. Which, speaking of, were super easy to follow. The instructions are a single page of diagrams that show you exactly how to position the microphone for optimal use.

It took me all of 3 minutes to unpackage the yeti and have it working. Optimizing my audio settings took some additional time, but still, the initial installation of the mic was way easier than I expected it to be.

Product Quality

It’s no secret that I’m not one to buy super high-quality gear for myself. I tend to grab something affordable and usable then use it until it breaks.

It should come as no surprise to you that I’ve been using a $40 headset for about 5 years now.

The microphone itself is fantastic. It’s got a nice weight to it and has a sturdy stand, but it’s small enough that it fits between my two monitors without any issues. The controls are easy to find and responsive allowing you to quickly adjust your gain or the output volume if you’re connecting your speakers or headphones through it.

Plus it looks sleek as hell. The gold accents are beautiful and match well well with the whole black and orange pattern my peripherals have. The runes etched into the bottom of the stand are a nice and tasteful touch of branding. You can tell it’s a WoW-flavored product, but it’s not “in your face” about it.

It’s nice. I’m not going to say that it was enough branding to suck my entire friend group into WoW again, but my buddy made a guild and there’s like 15 of us in it so far.

Sound Quality

Needless to say, my group appreciates the difference in sound quality between the yeti and my old dying headset. My voice is much clearer now and thanks to the included software, I tweaked the settings to further increase the quality of my voice.

For someone who DMs and plays TTRPGs exclusively online good sound quality is essential. My group can’t rely on body language or visual cues to communicate so we need to clearly hear each other throughout the entire session.

I’ve found myself repeating myself less due to sound issues since I switched to using the Yeti, and I don’t need to talk nearly as loud to be coherent which I’m sure my fiancée appreciates. I can confidently say that the Yeti has improved the quality of our game nights significantly.

Blue VO!CE Software

Do my friends like that they can hear me crystal clear thanks to my new mic? Yes.
Do my friends think the preset voice effects are funny? Yes.
Do they still think the effects are funny after the 100th time of me screaming “HELLO! HELLO! HELLO!” using the Blinagtron voice effect? They say no, but they still laugh. Curious.

In all seriousness, the proprietary Blue VO!CE software has been a fantastic tool for squeezing out the yeti’s full potential. The software gives you full control over your output settings so you can adjust every facet of your sound output.

The software is extremely user friendly. I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was doing as I was tweaking different settings, but it took me maybe 15-30 minutes to noticeably improve my sound quality and get familiar with the software.

I won’t claim that my sound quality is totally optimized, but it’s a noticeable improvement over the out-of-the-box default settings.

It also comes with a bunch of preset voice settings so you can quickly choose one if you don’t feel like playing around with it, but still want to adjust your audio quality.

Fun Voice Effects

Blue VO!CE also gives you the option to add voice effects to your output. More importantly, it gives you voice effect presets to quickly slap on for maximum prop humor. Even more importantly, Blue’s collab with WoW means there are WoW-themed presets.

Yes, that’s right. You can sound like a mechagnome while talking to your friends. It’s as amazing as it sounds.

Look at all these effects!

You can also create your own presets to fit whatever effect you could desire. While I use it for jokes about 100% of the time, I do intend to play around with it to create some preset effects for my Curse of Strahd campaign.

For example, I could swap into a spooky ghost voice when they speak with a ghost. If done well I believe that it’d aid in the players’ immersion in the game.

The voice effects are great for the jokes, but there’s tons of potential for them to be used for role-playing purposes. Especially for those of us who are not gifted with voice actor skills.

Conclusions

I adore my Yeti X World of Warcraft Edition mic. It has been my favorite toy for the past three weeks.

While I’ve had a lot of fun with it, it’s also been an exceptional addition to my DMing gear. A good mic is a huge asset for playing TTRPGs virtually, especially when you’re the DM. High audio quality ensures that the entire table clearly hears you which prevents miscommunications from occurring.

While $200 is a lot of money, the Yeti X World of Warcraft Edition is 100% worth the price. It’s a high-quality mic that’s extremely user-friendly.

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