BEACN Studio XLR Interface Review

BEACN Studio Dual-PC Creator XLR Interface

design

BEACN has kept things super simple with the design of the BEACN Studio, I’d probably go as far as to call it aggressively plain. Available in both black or white there’s not much that stands out on this little box with just a single large wheel and an RGB LED ring the only points of interest. It’s a major change from the BEACN Mix Create which is littered with buttons, dials and colour and while there’s no problem with minimalism, the BEACN Studio is almost a little too pared back for my liking.

That lonely single wheel performs a couple of roles, primarily it’s a volume dial your own output and it does this just fine though there’s very little resistance which makes it feel slack and disconnected. I also found on a couple of occasions I managed to drastically change my levels when leaning over the BEACN Studio and accidentally brushing it with my jumper. With no markings on the wheel and the app minimised I had no idea I’d even done it and it left me scratching my head for a few minutes trying to work out why I suddenly lost game audio.

For an XLR interface there’s also a distinct lack of XLR controls on board which feels like an oversight for me. While a firm press of the wheel will mute your mic all together (and change the LED ring red, yay for physical indicators!), there’s no way to control gain levels outside of the BEACN App. Given how much empty real estate is available across the top and sides of the BEACN Studio I’d have liked to have seen a second smaller dial built in somewhere. Admittedly this could be BEACN playing the long game in the hopes of convincing you to also grab a BEACN Mix Create, but you shouldn’t really need a second device to avoid needing to tab out to turn yourself down.

BEACN sits all of your ports across the back edge of the Studio which is good news for those who can’t stand the sight of cables as it makes for a very neat setup. You’ll find two USB-C ports, a 3.5mm headphone jack and an XLR input which are nicely spaced with plenty of room around each to stop things feeling cramped. I was a little surprised to see the headphone jack hidden away around the back though, for me this would have been better placed on the front instead to allow for a more logical desktop layout and easier access to plugging in and out on the fly.

Strangely I also found the USB-C ports incredibly shallow and even with the cables pushed in as far as they’d go a lot of the connector remained exposed. This might just have been a quirk of my unit and the actual connections never failed, but it felt like a rough edge you’d expect to see on a cheap knock-off device rather than a premium offering.

Build quality overall is decent enough though, it’s a neat little unit with no creaks, clicks or misaligned seams. The BEACN Studio is made entirely of plastic however and both very light and distinctly hollow feeling as a result. While I’ll admit that neither of these traits are a problem necessarily, you’ll likely never pick the BEACN Studio up again once you’ve set it up, but both do take a bit of the shine off that $250 premium device vibe.

A thin metal outer shell would have gone a long way to improving the experience here and added a little extra weight in the process. I’d pretty confidently guess the BEACN Studio’s lack of weight is the reason for the random rear support bar that sticks out of the back because it feels at odds with the rest of the unit from a purely design perspective. If that is why it’s there it does its job perfectly because in testing the BEACN Studio never lifted its front edge like I’ve seen with some capture cards in the past and I imagine a weighty XLR cable would have quickly had the Studio tilting it’s nose up at you or even flipping over entirely.

performance

Dual-PC audio might be the BEACN Studio’s showpiece but before you worry about sending your audio to multiple places it’s important to get it right in one, so before getting too funky I used it as a standard XLR interface in my single-PC streaming setup.

This turned out to be a pretty simple setup process, the BEACN App quickly recognised the Studio and if I’d have kept default settings could have gone live in maybe 10 minutes start to finish. For testing I’ve been using the BEACN Studio with the Shure MV7+ microphone but the beauty of the Studio is it unlocks BEACN’s clever post-processing for any XLR microphone from any brand. BEACN includes a single USB cable in the box, along with a USB-C to USB-A adapter which is a nice touch.

I’ve always been impressed by the BEACN App, it was the highlight of my time with the BEACN Mix Create and BEACN Mic and it remains a strong reason why the BEACN Studio is so good too. It’s just a fundamentally good approach to audio management with a pleasant UI that’s neatly laid out and does a good job of explaining what each option does. The App comes bundled with a couple of presets that will do a decent job for most people, but App is simple enough to use that I’d definitely recommend spending a few minutes playing around with each option and dialling things in manually.

With your voice sounding as good as can be, it’s time to turn attention to your other audio sources and once again, the BEACN App takes a lovely visual approach to conducting your digital orchestra. You’ll find a number of default, labelled channels (along with the ability to add more yourself) and the app generally does a good job of automatically categorising different sources to each though you can also click and drag them to different channels on the fly. Each group can then have its output levels tinkered with not only for you as a creator, but separately for your audience too. For example, you may want to turn up game audio in your own mix but keep it a little lower for your audience so they can still hear you clearly. It’s clever, it works well and it offers a huge amount of customisation potential.

It’s worth noting that none of this app functionality is unique to the BEACN Studio itself however, the BEACN Mix Create audio mixer is designed more specifically to manage those channels (and it does it very well indeed). Where you’ll start to see value from the BEACN Studio is when you’re looking to fling audio across two devices at once. The most obvious use case here is streamers running a two-PC setup and while I had to fake this experience with a laptop rather than a dedicated rendering PC, I can safely say the experience was about as plug-and-play as you could hope to see. Getting clear, latency-free audio from one PC to another was quick and simple, plus if you install the standalone BEACN Link App on device 2 you’ll even be able to send audio back to the original PC too, nifty.

For what it’s designed for, it’s hard to fault what the BEACN Studio can do. This has the potential to be a game changing device for dual-PC creators and I’m sure there’ll be people far more technologically creative than me who get this little plastic box to do some incredible things. Dual-PC setups aren’t the BEACN Studio’s only use though, because I found it worked just as well with my iPhone 15 Pro.

Admittedly this situation is perhaps more niche but I can see it being of huge benefit to podcasters and journalists because not only did my phone seamlessly recognise the BEACN Studio as a microphone, but I was also able to send my iPhone’s audio output to my PC at the same time. By playing around with routing options in the BEACN App I was even able to send a fully custom audio mix with more than just my mic to my iPhone, I’m not entirely sure to do with this ability in the real world, but it’s nice to know I can.

While BEACN does make the vague claim that the BEACN Studio “works with popular gaming consoles” in the product description, unfortunately I couldn’t get it to play nicely with my Xbox Series X which failed to recognise the device in any way. I’ve seen others have success with the PlayStation 5 so I’ve reached out to BEACN for clarification on console compatibility both now and in the future and will come back to this if things change.

summed up

I’ll say it again, the BEACN Studio has the potential to be a genuine game changer for creators running a dual-PC or even simply a dual-device setup. Not only does it do the basics of an XLR interface perfectly well, it makes it effortlessly simple to share audio across different pieces of hardware without latency or any drop in quality.

Couple that functionality with what’s already possible inside the BEACN app and you have a powerful, flexible and potential-filled combo on your hands. Yes it’s perhaps a little underwhelming physically, but I’ll forgive that for what’s going on under the hood. Tuck it away at the back of your desk, don’t accidentally bump that giant wheel and the BEACN Studio will become your best friend in no time.