Gator Frameworks Portable Desktop Microphone Isolation Shield with Round Base Stand 12" x 16" (GFW-MICISO1216)

The reality is you need a quiet place to record or you'll have noise. This stand does little to prevent anything but I guess it might help better than nothing at all.

You should have appropriate expectations with this shield. It will definitely help but it is not a pure substitute for having a well isolated space. Definite improvement over naked mic, especially if you have to have other sounds in the room by necessity

First, this is a really nice sound shield, large but not TOO large to use in a home or other small studio, it will help reduce echoes and reverberation from nearby walls and also cut down on ambient noise. You still want your room to be quiet, but this will make your recordings sound crisper and reduce ambient noise quite a bit.The build on this is all metal (except for the sound foam) and very heavy duty. The base was heavy enough and the system well balanced enough to hold my larger professional mics with ease. The actual sound shield attaches to the base with a 1/4-20 thread, so you can also use it on a tripod or mic stand without the provided base. The panels fold in two places so that when you aren't using it, it won't take up much space. They can be folded in to almost wrap around the mic or opened as wide as you want. In short it does what it says it does and does it very well.It comes without any instructions, but it's fairly easy to figure out how to assemble it. It's the right height to use on a desktop or you can remove the base and mount the whole thing on a mic stand or tripod.So why 1 star off? This is due to the mic mounting options. With the hardware you get, it works very well if you have a mic in an offset shock mount as shown in the product pictures. It is very easy to get this kind of mic positioned in the center of the shield and route the cable out the bottom.The problem is if you have one of the many types of mics that have both the mounting thread and the cables on the bottom. These mics are often 7 or more inches tall, so if you put them on the included extension pole they sit right at the top of the shield. You can take the extension off, but then the mic sits directly on the horizontal bracket and for many mics this will block the USB, XLR or headphone ports on the bottom. The same thing can happen if you want to put a directional hand mic or other type of mic where you have to talk into the end of the mic instead of the side. With this setup, you may not be able to get the mic far enough forward of the foam shield to give you space to connect the cable. Gator could have gotten around this problem fairly easily by having the bracket attach to the base instead of the bottom of the sound shield, or by supplying some longer brackets and different length extension poles.The sound shield performs well though, so I wouldn't consider this mounting issue a deal breaker. You can always put the mic on a separate stand positioned in front of the shield or do a DIY bracket extension with parts from the hardware store. I'm still taking off a star though, because these other types of mics are common so Gator really should have provided a way of mounting them easily.

I'm very impressed by the heavy-duty build of this mic shield. Based on the pictures, I thought that the back panels might be plastic, but the construction is all-metal and made to last. The base is nice and thick, and a non-slip bottom provides stability. The setup weighs 6.5 pounds before adding your microphone.In use, the shield does a good job of reducing the amount of unwanted noise picked up by my microphone. Of course, something like this can't work any miracles, so a quiet room is still necessary, but I do notice less reflections and reverberations in my recordings.The kit doesn't include any instructions, but assembly is straightforward enough, and the product listing photos help. For some microphones, particularly those with USB and/or monitoring ports on the bottom, the provided mount can be a tight fit. The rectangular, bottom support bar is a bit wide at 1-3/16", which can interfere with cabling.Of course, you can add a shock mount or use a separate mic stand to avoid port-access issues, but wider out-of-box flexibility/compatibility would have been nice. For example, the support bar could be slimmer and/or tapered, or the kit could have included a short extension rod (a 3.5" extender is included, but that can be too long for tall microphones).Overall, this is a very high-quality and effective isolation shield, maybe just a couple minor tweaks from perfection. Four stars.