EPOS B20 - Review

I’ve always been a bit wary of USB microphones as someone who spent a couple years as an audio engineer; I’ve always preferred to run XLR mics through an independently powered audio interface. Sure, there’s a lot more you have to worry about — preamps, impedance, load matching, and potential noise issues — but the amount of flexibility you gain in return has always been appealing to me. I was also generally of the impression that consumer devices, like USB microphones aimed at the gamer market, would carry a lower build quality than prosumer and professional devices aimed at recording engineers. The EPOS B20 absolutely proved me wrong on that front, and challenged a lot of the incorrect preconceptions I had about USB mics. There are, however, some pretty big issues I have with the B20, but I’ll get to that in a moment. 

Let’s start with the good, and let’s start with the best part of the good: the build quality. The B20 feels a little bit light compared to my usual daily driver microphone (a Sontronics STC-3X, for those wondering), but what it lacks in weight it more than makes up for in solidity. The B20 is a rock-solid microphone, with a sleek, metal construction that feels as good as it looks. And it is a great-looking mic, too, with a nice dark-grey gunmetal finish and just a pop of colour in the indicator LED, providing a quick glance option for checking if your mic is muted — something that’s helped me not look like an idiot in Zoom calls more than once. 

I was also incredibly impressed with the options available. The B20 offers four distinct polar patterns: the typical front-facing cardioid pattern, the ever-versatile omnidirectional pattern, the interview-focused bidirectional pattern, and to my surprise, an option for stereo recording, which truly does offer a great deal of directionality in recordings. It’s not quite a fancy binaural setup, but it more than gets the job done. All the IO is handled by a single USB-C port, and the mic comes with a heavy weighted base — in addition to the standard mini mic screw you’d normally see on a mic like this. I would’ve liked to also see some sort of pop filter, maybe something that magnetically attached or clipped onto the front, but I also haven’t had too many issues with blown plosives so I can’t knock it too much on that front. 

Thankfully, the B20 also sounds excellent in all of these recording patterns, with a clear, crisp vocal response and a solid response across the frequency spectrum. In my testing with the microphone, it was able to reproduce a guitar with perfect clarity and very little muddiness, while still producing a rich, if not overly warm sound. I prefer a cleaner, crisper sound over more warm, analogue-y tones, and that happens to also work well with my speaking voice, so in terms of sound quality and capture, I am very, very pleased. 

Unfortunately, while the hardware is all-around excellent, the software and firmware leaves a lot to be desired. I’ll start with the firmware: it’s odd. It’s really odd. The gain dial is way too touchy, with even just a couple millimetres of a turn on the dial ramping the gain all the way up or down. Even the slightest bump of the device, such as when you hit the mute button, can change the gain a pretty significant amount. The B20 also has a headphone jack, which is generally a plus with devices like this… but it’s always monitoring the microphone input. Always. There’s no option to turn off monitoring of your own voice, except for muting the mic itself. Which is great if you’re just using the headphone jack as a headphone jack, but if you’re on a call, streaming, or recording something, you might not want to hear yourself all the time. 

The EPOS Gaming Suite software is similarly odd, and similarly frustrating. You can’t change any options for either the microphone itself or the mic’s headphone jack unless both of them are set as the default devices in their category. That means if, like me, you’re frustrated with the always-on monitoring when using the device’s headphone jack and use a different output device, you have to switch the device to the B20, change the mic settings, then change the output device back to what it was. When all you want to do is tweak a small setting or bump up the gain a tiny bit (remember, fine control with the physical gain dial is next to impossible), it’s incredibly annoying. Perhaps it’s a technical necessity, but if it’s not, then I simply see no reason to not allow me to change the settings on a device connected to my computer, even if it’s not set as the default in Windows. 

When you do have access to the software, though, it also tends to be a bit finicky and break from time to time. I’ve had sliders not affect the settings they’re supposed to, buttons show as pressed when they’re not, and sometimes even the entire app just shows a blank screen. That’s really disappointing, because there are some neat options in there — the voice enhancer does a great job of boosting just the right frequencies to make you sound nice, the noise gate and noise cancellation features work well, and a high pass filter is always a useful tool to have… all of which are exclusive to the software that is incredibly annoying to use, if it works at all. 

The EPOS B20 is a solidly-built and excellent-sounding mic that truly changed my mind about what a USB microphone is even capable of. But while it excels in hardware quality, a combination of odd firmware choices and downright frustrating software holds back what could otherwise be an excellent experience. If these issues get ironed out down the road, I would have no issues saying that this is my favourite microphone in my collection, but until or unless that happens, I’ll probably be sticking with my XLR mics. 

The Score

6.0

Review unit provided by EPOS

The Pros

+Extremely solid build quality and features

+Looks and sounds excellent

+Easy access mute button for when you really need it

The Cons

-Odd firmware choices

-Recommended software is a frustrating and buggy

-Pop filter would’ve been a nice inclusion