Nacon Rig M2 Streamstar review

Streaming is more popular than it's ever been, and that means manufacturers are clamouring to release streaming-suitable microphones into a market that's starting to feel rather crowded. From cheap and cheerful desktop condenser mics to close-up dynamic wonders, if you'd like to capture your gaming-induced yelps and squeals for the world to hear (or perhaps some sombre narration), you're somewhat spoilt for choice.

The Nacon Rig M2 Streamstar is the latest microphone addition vying for your hard-earned cash. It's presented as a desktop microphone complete with screw-on stand, but as a streaming mic you can attach it to a boom arm to get up close and personal. It's also got a magnetic rear backplate with R-I-G written on it in bold white letters, which Nacon says you can swap out with a custom plate if you get one printed with your particular logo.

Self-promotion is important in the streaming game, after all. Anyway, it's $130, and that puts it in the upper mid-range of the streaming microphone market—and only $19 cheaper than our best microphone for gaming pick, the Shure MV6. That's a seriously impressive mic, so the Nacon unit has its work cut out for it right from the start.

The Streamstar is a fairly innocuous-looking device, resembling an all-black deck of playing cards tilted up on its side when attached to the included stand. On paper it's also got some impressive specs, including 24-bit audio capture with a 192 Hz sampling rate. On the front are two dials, one for gain adjustment and one for monitor volume. Underneath is a 3.5 mm aux output for headphone monitoring, and a USB Type-C connection, with an included USB Type-A to Type-C cable.

You might think you'd need to install some included software before you get going with the Streamstar, but there isn't any. Nope, the quick start guide tells you to assemble the stand, plug the cable in, and then set the sample rate in the Windows audio settings. I appreciate simplicity, but there's something about the whole experience here that feels barebones right from the start.

That's not helped by the front-mounted controls. This is going to sound like a silly thing to point out, but while the microphone and stand feel of… passable quality, the front dials wobble like they're not quite connected properly. It's been a while since a dial made me grimace, but here we are.

Whether that matters to you largely depends on how often you'll use them, but as you'll see later on, the gain dial becomes rather important. Said gain dial is the lower of the two, and is ringed in white light when the microphone is live, and red when it's clicked in to mute. The click itself feels fairly sturdy, so plus points there.

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A stand-out feature of the Streamstar is Bluetooth monitoring. In essence, you can pair a set of earbuds to the mic itself for live audio monitoring, free from the burden of cables, by long-pressing the top dial.

Or at least, that's how it's supposed to work. I tried connecting a pair of Sennheiser Bluetooth earbuds to the mic, but the instructions are very basic and it required a fair bit of fiddling around, pairing and unpairing, before I got a usable result.

Some software interjection would really help here. A simple app that allows you to see which devices are paired to the mic—and which inputs and outputs are being used at any one time—would make things a lot more straightforward, rather than relying on the arcane Windows audio settings page. Still, after much cursing, a reliable input and output was achieved.

Time to see whether those specs translate to great audio. I first recorded my voice with the Streamstar in a desktop position at a mere six inches away with a reasonable amount of gain, and immediately thought I'd screwed up a recording setting, as the Audacity waveform barely moved in response. Cranking the gain to maximum, however, resulted in this:

The vocal tone itself is perfectly decent, but the clip above is me speaking forcefully, at maximum gain, with the mic placed in front of my keyboard. A desktop mic would generally sit further back than this, but move it to a less obtrusive position and your voice disappears into the distance even with the gain cranked to high heaven. Back it down, and the Streamstar struggles to capture your voice at a decent volume over the background noise.

Speaking of which, what you'll also notice is a fair amount of hiss even though I recorded these clips in a dead quiet room. The Streamstar's 16 mm electret condenser has a tendency to highlight every sound it can pick up except your voice when used with the included stand, meaning that noise cancellation is near essential. Except it doesn't come with any, which strikes me as something of a fatal flaw.

Undeterred, I recorded a clip with the mic attached to a boom arm directly in front of me, but with my mouth slightly off to the side, (an old-school microphone technique that tends to work wonders), and managed a better result—at least in terms of gain:

While I'm certainly used to the idea of microphones sounding better the closer they are to your face, this is the first condenser mic I've used where I'd consider a close-mic position pretty much essential. Get the Streamstar up close, and it manages to capture a warm tone that would be perfectly usable for streaming.

However, it's still a little noisy. More than that, in a close position the Streamstar is quite plosive-prone, meaning "puh" and "buh" tones have a tendency to get blown out, even when speaking off to the side. You can hear this in the clip above, particularly as I say the "p" in "lockpick". Many streamers lack proper microphone technique and speak directly into the front of the mic at close range, and that's a recipe for audio disaster with this particular unit, given the lack of software help.

What this means in practice is you're likely going to be adjusting the gain on a regular basis to minimise unwanted audio nasties—which means wrestling with volume and background hiss/plosive issues until you force them into an uneasy standoff using a wobbly dial. That's the sort of compromise you'd normally have to make with a cheap microphone, but at $130, cheap this ain't.

I really can't get on with the Streamstar, much as I have tried. It looks like a streamer-worthy microphone on paper, and the Bluetooth monitoring feature is a lovely idea, but in practice, it's got far too many flaws. It's too quiet to use in a standard desktop position without excessive background noise, it's plosive-prone in a close-up position, and crucially, it's missing any software help to rectify either issue.

Plus, the materials are so-so, the dials feel wobbly, and there's nothing about it that suggests to me that it's a $100+ product. When you can pick up a Razer Seiren Mini for a mere $50 (or even less, as it regularly goes on sale) and it performs as well as it does for such a minimal sum, I really don't see why you'd pay more than double for the Streamstar.

The Razer also lacks noise cancellation, but it has no problem picking up vocals at a reasonable volume from a traditional desktop position without pegging the gain to the maximum.

Or you could spend $19 more than the Streamstar and opt for the Shure MV6. It's much more obtrusive, but it's an excellent mic that picks up well both close up and at a distance. It also comes with powerful noise cancelling software, meaning you can remove background noise with a single slider, and it's built like the proverbial tank to boot.

There are many USB microphones on the market for streamers to choose from, and while the Streamstar looks great on paper, in practice, it fails to deliver the smooth audio experience achieved by many of its rivals. It's a fiddly, fussy mic with questionable materials, and for $130, I really do expect more than this. A bit of a swing and a miss, I'm afraid.