Blue Yeti Scaled Down: Yeti Nano An Attractive Full-Featured $99 Desktop Microphone

Wanting a product because it’s “cute” is probably one of the worst reasons to haul out the credit card, but Blue’s Yeti Nano speaks to me. Like pretty much everyone else on the planet, I’ve been using Blue’s full-sized Yeti for a while (two others on the Techgage team have one also), and it’s been serving me extremely well for recording our YouTube voice-overs, and for gaming with friends.

The Yeti Nano isn’t a replacement for the Yeti, as its “Nano” name might suggest. It’s a smaller version of the full-sized microphone, but in some ways looks even better, in my opinion. It’s aesthetically pleasing – a microphone that can actually add to your decor. Blue even draws attention to that in its press release, stating: “The premium finish looks great on camera and on any desktop.”

The target audience here is largely the same as it was for the Yeti. That includes YouTube production, game streaming, VoIP, voice over work, and so on. The Yeti Nano is a plug-and-play device, so all you need to do is deal with setting the proper sound device in your OS of choice after plugging it in (in my experience, Windows likes to automatically set the Yeti as an output device). As with the original Yeti, you’d be able to plug the Nano into the PlayStation 4 and have it work as expected, as well. Xbox gamers are out-of-luck thanks to the lack of console flexibility.

Blue Yeti and Yeti Nano

The Yeti Nano supports 24-bit/48kHz recording, and whittled down the four pick-up patterns to two, settling on cardioid and omnidirectional – choices that should suit the vast majority of the Nano’s audience. Blue notes that the omni mode is great for conference calls, so the Nano isn’t only expected to be a consumer desktop mic. Fortunately, despite being a whittled down version, the Nano still includes a headphone amplifier for monitoring and playback.

What’s really intriguing is that Blue is debuting a software application with this mic, called Blue Sherpa. With it, you can fine-tune the settings, and quickly mute and unmute your mic or headphones. This software will also be responsible for firmware updates, and for those with older Blue mics, you can expect support to be rolled out to the application in the future.

If the Yeti Nano speaks to you (which would be odd, given the product), you can head here and snatch it up for $99 USD.