Razer has been a big name in gaming and streaming since the early days and that is for one reason; they put a lot into the gamer experience. Their look is unique, thus incredibly recognizable when you see your favourite creator using their gear and they deliver good quality. Today, Razer released two new microphones: a new take on the Seiren Mini, one of my favourite budget plug-and-play microphones in the past few years, and the microphone we are looking at today, the Razer Seiren V3 Chroma.
The Razer Seiren V3 Chroma is a supercardioid condenser microphone with on-board controls and 10-zone RGB. In the box, you get the Seiren V3 Chroma with an attached mount for either the provided base or a mic arm, a 6ft braided USB-C to USB-A cable and the documentation. The packaging, Razer’s signature green and black, is really appealing and the little ribbon loop makes getting the internal box out of the main packaging so much easier.
The build on the Razer Seiren V3 Chroma is very light, but sturdy. The capacitive mute button is incredibly responsive and it does a lot more than mute, though. It can perform programmable functions with double and triple taps of the button, holding down the button for 3 seconds switches the knob’s function between headphone volume and mic gain and holding for 10 seconds does a factory reset.
The single knob on the front is one of the smoothest knobs I have felt. That little bit of resistance provides not only a good feeling experience but helps you fine-tune the settings on your mic that much better. The mount has dual threads (⅜” and ⅝”), allowing for a wide variety of connections to the mount of your choice.
“The way that the RGB passes through the grill of the Razer Seiren V3 Chroma is hypnotic. The animation between the different zones is the cleanest that I have seen on a microphone…”
The way that the RGB passes through the grill of the Razer Seiren V3 Chroma is hypnotic. The animation between the different zones is the cleanest that I have seen on a microphone, made possible by the 10 separate lighting zones (compared to 4 zones on the HyperX Quadcast S). What’s more, it can do any animation, with every square millimetre of the microphone capable of displaying its own colour and brightness, allowing for realistic and mesmerizing effects.
The Razer Seiren V3 Chroma can be plug-and-play and ready for use on any application you use, be it OBS, Discord, Audacity, or wherever else you may need a microphone. The real treat, however, is when you connect Razer’s software, Razer Synapse. From there, you get a lot of control over your microphone and your stream.
Within Razer Synapse, you can control aspects of the microphone that can be found on the physical device and additional advanced features. First, you can change the function of the knob between Headphone Volume and Mic Gain (the same way that the capacitive button does) via a dropdown. You can also adjust the actual headphone volume and mic gain from within the app.
In terms of the more advanced changes you can make, you can program what the double and triple tap of the capacitive button does, whether it is toggling the RGB on/off, cycling through chroma effects or selecting specific ones. You can change your sampling rate between 44.1kHz, 48kHz and 96kHz, you can activate a high pass filter, and you can access two advanced gain settings: Digital Gain Limiter, preventing you from clipping if you get too loud, and Auto Gain Control, which will raise your gain if you are too quiet and lower it when you get too loud.
Razer’s stream mixer lets you take all of your audio elements and put them out as one source to your favourite streaming app or DAW. Not a lot has changed since I looked at this software for the Razer Seiren V2 Pro. It is perfectly functional and easy to set up new sources, but the horizontal faders are just a less efficient use of the space and make it a little bit harder to navigate as a result.
As much as Razer may want to set themselves apart from competing software solutions, a vertical fader system is a much cleaner solution for streamers. All other functionality available in the app? Only a couple of notes. I’d love to see Razer offer processing for the microphone in the software because, if you use the stream mix for OBS, you’d be applying processing to everything at once, including game audio and music, which isn’t ideal.
“The price of the Razer Seiren V3 Chroma was honestly a shock, given its feature-set.”
The lighting tab in Synapse gives you full control over all of the RGB on the Razer Seiren V3 Chroma. You can control its brightness, what colour the mic will turn when muted or when it is peaking (both are defaulted as red). You can turn on a colour spectrum that it goes through when adjusting headphone volume and mic gain which you can see on the microphone in real time.
In terms of lighting effects, Razer Synapse offers a lot of presets, from colour cycle, to breathing, to fire, to starlight (all of which can be applied across all Razer devices to sync up). The advanced effects tab allows you to fully customize the entire look of the microphone and its animations. It is a little more complicated, but people who like to get into the weeds to personalize their look will love this feature.
One last software solution, the Streamer Companion App, will allow you even more control over the lighting on your microphone. You connect to your streaming platform of choice and this will allow your mic to change when certain stream alerts are triggered, giving you even more visuals for your audience when they follow or subscribe to you.
But don’t let the shiny lights distract you from the fact that the audio quality of the Razer Seiren V3 Chroma is incredible. Lighter microphones often lead to pretty thin audio, but that is not the case here. My voice was every bit as bright as the lighting on the capsule. The mic is fairly neutral when it comes to the mid-range frequencies and the bass is pretty good. There is some residual ambient noise despite the supercardioid polar pattern.
Actually, this particular polar pattern only captured a small bit of the nearby noise (my PC), but it wasn’t the fans so much as the minor buzzing from the vibration caused by something touching my PC Case. The high pass filter seemed to lessen the impact of the ambience.
These small things are expected behaviours of a condenser microphone (albeit minimized better than most companies have been able to manage) and I came into the test expecting to have to mess around with the processing. The good news is that you don’t HAVE to put any processing on this mic. You can get away with the sound out of the box in 99 out of 100 cases, but if you are the kind who likes to shape your vocal profile, you are still able to do it, just not within the app. You’ll need to utilize a different app’s processing to get that done. Once that is done, your vocals can be perfected.
The price of the Razer Seiren V3 Chroma was honestly a shock, given its feature-set. This microphone retails at $129.99 USD, which is definitely at the low end of the price spectrum for a microphone with this look, this many on-board functions and one of the most feature-rich software solutions in the market. The Razer Seiren V3 Chroma comes very close to being a must-buy for streamers. It has most everything you are looking for in a microphone at a fantastic price.
The only thing that might change this recommendation is your own personal aesthetic. You may not be looking for something so flashy, meaning that a lot of other more modestly designed mics that can enter the chat. That all being said, the Seiren V3 Chroma is my new favourite microphone on offer from Razer and its release, alongside the release of the Razer Seiren V3 Mini, show us that the company is very much in the microphone game to stay.
