The Shure PGA48 is part of the company's ALTA series: a line meant to provide their signature legendary vocal mic pedigree at a more affordable price point. To cater to different needs, we divided the list into two sections - XLR & USB, with XLR being popular for live sound and USB is ideal for home recording. In this guide we present to you the highest rated microphones that you can buy for under $50 hidden gems that we unearthed through our research and analysis of over 72,100 review and rating sources. Having great sounding mics within budget is no longer a myth as more of these products make waves inside and outside the audio engineering community. These days, many manufacturers either have a higher baseline for research, development and manufacture or trickle down their top tier tech to their more affordable products. Mics priced affordably were generally not that good sounding and were full of long-term reliability issues.
There was a time when 'budget' meant 'compromised' or 'inferior'.
