I've spent two days with Elgato's Wave Link and it's a genuine benefit

Elgato's Wave Link mixer now accepts non-Elgato microphones, so any input your Windows or Mac device recognises can be routed, treated and mixed. It lets you add effects and adjust sound on the fly for microphones and output devices, and swapping between presets is as simple as clicking the mix you want.

You can fix jarring dynamics between apps like Spotify and Chrome with a compressor and limiter, but effects are applied at the start of a mixer stack. That means you can’t, for example, add a de-esser to Chrome for your personal mix while leaving the stream mix untouched, and adding duplicate instances of Chrome doesn’t get around that.

The app supports eight inputs, and while a track can have multiple outputs it cannot accept multiple inputs, so items in the same section must be treated the same way. Microphone input can also be processed in Wave Link and then sent to the output stack.

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