Music – Earlybirds Invest

At a glance

Expert’s Rating

Pros

Integrated interface, connection via USB-C
Second microphone or instrument can be connected
48-volt phantom power supply
Powerful sound

Cons

Requires a stand or boom
Registration required for software use

Our Verdict

Price When Reviewed

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Best Pricing Today

Price When Reviewed

349

Best Prices Today: Shure MV7i

I’ve never had a microphone like the Shure MV7i in my hand or on my desk. It combines the simplicity of a USB-C connection with the requirements of high-quality microphones and instruments. Particularly practical: the MV7i also serves as an interface for an additional XLR microphone or a guitar via the 6.3 mm jack input. It can be an exciting solution for travelling because if you want only to record two voices or a voice with a guitar, you don’t need a separate interface.

As soon as I unpack it, I realise that the MV7i is designed for professional users, or those who want to become one. You can neither hold it easily in your hand like the Shure SM58 vocal microphone, (which I will use later for comparison) nor place it on a table. Instead, you screw it onto a microphone stand or boom, which you need to provide.

There are three connections on the back of the microphone: a USB-C socket, a 3.5 mm jack for headphones, and a combined XLR and line-in socket (6.3 mm jack). Plug the supplied three-meter USB-C cable into the microphone and into ta Mac, headphones into the socket, acoustic guitar connected, GarageBand started with a new project, two tracks selected, configured for simultaneous recording–oops, the same mix of voice and guitar comes out on both channels. How’s that?

Of course, I have once again fallen victim to my impatience. The secret lies in the manufacturer’s Motiv Mix app, which you can download to your computer from the Shure website by entering your personal details. The first step is to select that I want to send more tracks to the digital audio workstation (DAW)–in this case, GarageBand–and not mix both channels to mono. I could even use the stereo signal for the second input and split the input of the first one to both channels.

Shure

I have already outlined the promise of the MV7i: recording two voices simultaneously without an additional interface, either two speakers or a singer with guitar. This is easily achieved with the right settings. How well does the microphone separate the two inputs from each other? The manufacturer promises that the main microphone on channel 1 reduces ambient noise as soon as you speak or sing into it.

It does a decent job, but I can still hear the sound of the acoustic guitar quite clearly in the background, even in the passages of the recording where I’m speaking. The electric guitar is less audible, it is also much quieter without amplification, which was to be expected. Conversely, on channel 2 via the 6.3mm jack cable, none of the voice gets through to the recording.

Ideally suited for live situations

The MV7i is suitable for use in a live performance with a small amount of equipment. The little bit of echo that you hear through the microphone is completely lost in the mix. With professional studio recordings, you usually work differently and record in separate rooms, at different times or both.

In my second small series of tests, I used the Shure SM58 as my second microphone. This is a classic, dynamic microphone with a cardioid characteristic that has been appreciated by speakers and singers on stage and in studios for decades. This makes it a good benchmark for the new MV7i. Here, too, the separation of the two channels is excellent, albeit not perfect, so you can always hear a little of the signal recorded with the other microphone on one channel–as long as only one person is speaking. I simulated simultaneous speaking by holding the SM58 directly next to the MV7i and speaking into both microphones. Lo and behold, the MV71 now has clear priority, with practically nothing coming through the second channel on the audio track. Nice.

Shure

Control via “touchbar” and app

If you want to completely silence the other person, the touch-sensitive LED bar on the top of the microphone can help. This is the only control option, as the microphone has no buttons or controls. The most important function is undoubtedly mute: a quick tap on the side, the LED changes from green to red, and the box is quiet. What can happen, however, is that you tap the bar unintentionally and are surprised when you have more signal on your headphones or the output of the DAW.

This bar, which is reminiscent of Apple’s Touch Bar of the past, can also be used to control the microphone gain and headphone volume; in the Motiv Mix app, you can not only make further settings, but also change the colour gradients of the bar.

Further settings are possible and can also be adjusted directly on the microphone, where the presets are also saved. For example, you can choose from three types of reverb, adjust the sound colour from “Dark” to “Natural” to “Bright” or set the high-pass filter (Off, 75Hz, 150Hz) and compressor (Off, Bright, Medium, Strong). When recording at home with Shure SM58 and guitar via an audio interface (I have one from M-Audio), this is done in the software on the Mac.

But the settings saved on the microphone itself have the advantage that they are immediately available on any computer, smartphone, or tablet in any application, and you don’t have to spend a lot of time making adjustments, at least if you ignore different room acoustics.

The sound is convincing

But how does the Shure MV7i sound in practice? I recorded myself without any further adjustments, and immediately noticed clear differences from the Shure SM58. The MV7i sounds fresher, more natural, and undistorted. This is thanks to several smart features: The intelligent popper stopper minimizes plosive sounds, while the real-time denoiser filters out distracting noises. In addition, the Smartgate automatic volume control adjusts the recording to the room and distance without sounding unnatural. The gain automatically adjusts up to 60 dB; I didn’t notice any clipping in testing.

Another interesting feature is what the Motiv Mix app records: In addition to the mix from both tracks, it also records the separate signals, without having to fiddle around in Logic, GarageBand, or any other software. This also makes things a lot easier in recording situations where things have to be done quickly.

Should you buy the Shure MV7i?

The price of the MV71 is fair considering its audio quality, as decent audio interfaces for two microphones or a microphone plus instrument also cost more. If you only record occasionally and don’t have such high demands in terms of quality, you can get away with cheaper. But then it also sounds cheap.

Last summer, I quit Spotify, and wrote about it with the rather unsubtle headline “Why I quit Spotify.” My reasons remain sound: The software had become clunky, the ads relentless, and the Sabrina Carpenter songs too inescapable. I wanted to find a better music streaming service. It gives me no pleasure to report that a few weeks ago, I rejoined.

The algorithm got me. I don’t just mean that it got me, the way the TikTok algorithm glues you to the screen. Spotify’s algorithm got me the way an old friend gets me and my weird affection for yacht rock or ongoing obsession with French touch music from the mid-Aughts. It took a few months of digging through the proverbial crates of Apple Music for me to realize that Spotify has something other streaming services could never get: 15 years of my music listening habits and artificially intelligent software to reinforce those habits.

This is why algorithms tend to be viewed as villains these days. They’re the technology behind TikTok’s For You page, which keeps feeding you weird videos you can’t stop watching, and Amazon recommendations that appear to know what prescription you’re taking. Facebook’s algorithms, meanwhile, have been radicalizing Americans for at least a decade, and Instagram’s algorithmic feed is wrecking the mental health of an entire generation. The implications of Spotify’s algorithms, you could argue, are quaint by comparison.

Spotify’s algorithm got me the way an old friend gets me and my weird affection for yacht rock.

Quitting and unquitting Spotify made me realize something, though. As central as algorithmic feeds are to how you consume information, you have more control over how those algorithms shape your tastes and behavior than you might think.

If an algorithm works for you — as Spotify’s does for me — don’t feel bad about submitting to its effortless and convenient offerings.

Music has always been important to me, and over the years, it started to feel like I had to gamify Spotify to find songs that I truly loved. When Spotify launched in 2011, it was basically a massive library of all the music, but over the years, it introduced more and more algorithmic recommendations and playlists that promised to match my taste. It still took work to find the good stuff.

This work is what has now made Spotify’s algorithms irreplaceable to me. It has a decade-and-a-half of my listening history, and over the years, I’ve learned its quirks and tinkered with it to meet my needs. I spent months trying to replicate this experience on Apple Music, but its algorithms struggled to surprise me.

All music streaming algorithms operate on two basic principles: content-based filtering and collaborative filtering. The content-based filtering tries to identify specific aspects of a song itself, including the artist, genre, mood, and so forth, to queue up the next song. Collaborative filtering refers to recommendations made based on other people who listen to a certain song and what else they listen to. If two people listen to the same five songs, there’s a good chance they’ll both like this sixth song. It’s all math, and sometimes there are anomalies that will delight you.

“Some of the serendipity that you get is sort of error turned into virtue,” Glenn McDonald, a former data alchemist at Spotify and creator of Every Noise at Once, told me. “So you’re surprised, and sometimes those surprises are pleasant.”

It’s not just that Spotify’s recommendations tend to be pleasant because it has a lot of data about me. It’s that Spotify has the listening history of 675 million people, whose interests may overlap with mine in countless different ways. Over the years, I’ve developed a set of habits that help me hone those recommendations — things like making playlists, rejecting recommendations I don’t like, exploring artists’ catalogs, and maybe most importantly, digging through other people’s playlists.

This is what I call lean-forward listening. While it’s easy enough to click on Discover Weekly every Monday, lean back and listen to the whole thing like a radio show, and then move on to the next playlist, the more effort you put into curating your experience, the better the algorithms will work next time. At the very least, you’ll find your way onto a playlist that algorithms didn’t create.

How to resist algorithmic rule

Like them or not, algorithmic recommendations aren’t going anywhere. Companies like Spotify like them because — when they work — algorithms keep people hooked on their products. Companies like Amazon like them because algorithmic recommendations enable them to steer people’s behavior. The right product recommendation could lead someone to buy something they didn’t otherwise plan on buying. (We’ve all done it.)

This status quo seems dystopian in a lot of ways. Algorithmic recommendations were all the rage a couple of decades ago, when personalization felt convenient rather than creepy. Netflix deserves a lot of credit for this, since it pioneered the concept of giving you customized movie recommendations in the late 1990s. But by the early 2010s, it was getting hard to tell the difference between personalized recommendations and targeted ads. Now, practically everything you see online is personalized to a degree, from the front page of the New York Times to the list of restaurants in your favorite food delivery app.

You can probably learn to live with it when you’re talking about music on Spotify or burrito restaurants on DoorDash. “The stakes are a little bit higher when it comes to recommending things like products on Amazon, and even higher when it comes to recommending things like content on Facebook,” said Meredith Broussard, a data journalism professor at New York University. “Because, as we all know, disinformation and misinformation are very, very popular, but not good.”

The role algorithms, which are designed to boost engagement, play in spreading misinformation is a book-length topic. For now, I’ll just reiterate that you don’t have to lean back and let Facebook, Google, or X flood you with algorithmically generated information. You can learn more about how these platforms use algorithms and steer them to your advantage.

If you’re sick of the algorithm on X feeding you right-wing propaganda, try Bluesky, which lets you pick different algorithms for your feed. And if Netflix or any other streaming service has gotten stale, try nuking your view history and starting over. Spotify offers a list of details about how it recommends content and how you can make tweaks. And Amazon has a tool that’s designed to improve your recommendations. (I have tried all of these things, including the Amazon tool, which is very tedious but still possibly helpful.)

Things get a little tougher on big platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, whose algorithms tend toward the black box end of the spectrum. Still, knowing how algorithms work and playing an active role in making them work better for you can improve your experience on almost any platform. Algorithms are only in charge if you let them be.

In some cases, you might like it when the algorithm’s in charge. This is how I generally feel on Spotify, although I’m constantly correcting it and guiding it. This is also how I generally feel on Amazon, where I try to buy only the basics. I quit Instagram a while ago when I decided the algorithm was in charge a little too much. If I get bored one day, I might try it again.

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What you need to know

Android bot that looks like you

Expert’s Rating

Pros

Cons

Our Verdict

Price When Reviewed

Best Prices Today: Shure MV7i

Ideally suited for live situations

Control via “touchbar” and app

The sound is convincing

Should you buy the Shure MV7i?

How to resist algorithmic rule

History of NFTs in Music

How NFTs are transforming the music industry

Creating and selling NFT music

Challenges and controversies

The future of NFT music

Conclusion