AKG Lyra

Sur le papier, ce micro est plein de promesses. Je connais bien AKG pour utiliser au quotidien une paire de leurs micros haut de gamme. Il me manquait un petit micro USB pour faire des podcasts à la volée sans interface audio à transporter et donc je l'ai acheté.
Premier constat, les potards sont cheap mais rien de grave vu le prix. Par contre, j'ai eu tout de suite un faux contact au niveau de la prise USB : il faut jouer avec le contacteur pour que le courant passe, puis ne plus toucher au câble pour qu'il reste connecté. Autre soucis, là où il est sensé être détecté par le PC automatiquement, ça n'a pas été le cas sous Windows 10 ni sous Linux, sachant que ce dernier n'est normalement pas pris en charge (Pourquoi d'ailleurs ? C'est frustrant).
Bref, je vous déconseille ce micro vu sa mauvaise qualité de fabrication, par contre je pense qu'il doit être pratique avec ses différents patterns et une qualité de son très correcte...

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