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On Audacity, I had some minor stuttering issues when recording, but this was solved by increasing the audio buffer from 100 to 250ms. Naturally, I also increased the audio offset to -250ms so that the new tracks lined up with what I was recording over.

At the microphone level, after the sound has been amplified, it is converted to a digital signal before being sent over the USB cable. The upshot of this is that there is almost no discernible background noise.

I tested the microphone by creating my own multi-tracked song featuring some singing and some guitar chords. I applied no compression, normalisation, pitch adjustment or noise reduction and merely layered it all up and adjusted the volumes of each track. The result was a rather impressive and entirely flat waveform, even though I'd usually expect some white noise - clearly indicative of a high quality microphone.

Being a unidirectional cardioid microphone, it also did a pretty good job of cutting out other background noises too. I don't have double glazing and it was a particularly windy day when I recorded the test, yet this didn't come through.

Verdict

At £199, the PG27USB microphone offers a convenient all-in-one solution for any operating system, with the sound quality you would expect from a company like Shure. If you're into podcasts or recording your own music at home, this is a worthwhile investment.

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