The Tale of the New Microphone
Oct. 13th, 2007 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amethyst73Back in May 2006, kristin on Librivox started a project to record Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance. I volunteered (somewhat nervously) to sing Mabel. Working with sheet music and MIDI files, there's a bunch of us all over the country/world, each singing his/her own part(s), and sending them in to kristin, our marvelous coordinator and editor.
Ever since January 2006 when we joined Librivox, we've been working with a Logitech USB noise-cancelling desktop microphone. It's very much a starter mic, generally found for $20-30. Speech recorded through it is perfectly adequate, albeit a little metallic-sounding. Ever since this past July, when I put together a duet of the Star-Spangled Banner with kristin (she sang melody, I made up a descant), I've been wanting a better mic for recording, because darn it! you can really hear the difference in the quality of the recordings (ambient noise, warmth, etc) between hers and mine. And I was quite certain she had a nicer microphone than I did.
So this year for my birthday, the huz did some research and found a nice microphone in our price range. It's a Blue Snowball, and we ordered it just shy of a week ago. Amazon never gave us a 'package mailed' notification, presumably because it was actually sold by BSW, who I guess is using Amazon as a convenient middleman. I was delighted to find a box with BSW signage on it when I got home last night!
Not being a sound/mic/speaker sort of person, I hadn't ever heard of BSW before. They get high marks from me, though. The first thing I found when I opened the box was a little card, face down, with a staple through it. When I turned it over, I discovered it had a photo of a guy speaking into a microphone: "Nothin' beats the sweet sound of my new mic from BSW! Let's celebrate with some almond roca!" Said candy was stapled to the card. Nummy! How many merchants do that, I ask you?
Going into the actual product box, we found:
- da ball-shaped microphone
- USB cable
- mic stand
- manual (well, sort of)
- product registration card
I mention the latter two only because they demonstrate that Blue has a sense of humor. Just a couple of quick demos of this off the product registration card:
Age group: 18 & under / 18-29 / 30-39 / 40-49 / 50+ / Cryogenically frozen
Are you now or have you ever been a memb - oops! Sorry. Wrong questionnaire. Please continue.
Clearly this is a manufacturer who is Cool.
The bad: The microphone stand leaves something to be desired. It successfully lifts the mic off the surface of whatever it's sitting on, but that's about it. It doesn't lock the stem in one rotational position (which means the USB cable has a tendency to pull the back of the microphone and thus needs to be restrained), and it doesn't appear to be extendable at all. [EDIT: The huz just figured out how to lock the stand in a longer position. Head still rotates though.]
The good: When the microphone is plugged into a USB port, our Macs both recognize it. And boy, it sounds niiiiiiiiiiice for speech! I put together a quick (under 2 minute) test of our old mic, and all the settings of the new one. You can listen to the ~6MB WAV file here.
I'm delighted by the warm, even sound that the Snowball gives on settings 1 and 2 (cardioid pickup pattern - that's directional for all us non-techie types), and kind of astonished by all the noisiness apparent in the room when the omnidirectional pattern is used. I did a quick test last night of singing into it, and it sounds like it's going to work very well for that too. Happiness!!!!!!
Not being a sound/mic/speaker sort of person, I hadn't ever heard of BSW before. They get high marks from me, though. The first thing I found when I opened the box was a little card, face down, with a staple through it. When I turned it over, I discovered it had a photo of a guy speaking into a microphone: "Nothin' beats the sweet sound of my new mic from BSW! Let's celebrate with some almond roca!" Said candy was stapled to the card. Nummy! How many merchants do that, I ask you?
Going into the actual product box, we found:
- da ball-shaped microphone
- USB cable
- mic stand
- manual (well, sort of)
- product registration card
I mention the latter two only because they demonstrate that Blue has a sense of humor. Just a couple of quick demos of this off the product registration card:
Age group: 18 & under / 18-29 / 30-39 / 40-49 / 50+ / Cryogenically frozen
Are you now or have you ever been a memb - oops! Sorry. Wrong questionnaire. Please continue.
Clearly this is a manufacturer who is Cool.
The bad: The microphone stand leaves something to be desired. It successfully lifts the mic off the surface of whatever it's sitting on, but that's about it. It doesn't lock the stem in one rotational position (which means the USB cable has a tendency to pull the back of the microphone and thus needs to be restrained), and it doesn't appear to be extendable at all. [EDIT: The huz just figured out how to lock the stand in a longer position. Head still rotates though.]
The good: When the microphone is plugged into a USB port, our Macs both recognize it. And boy, it sounds niiiiiiiiiiice for speech! I put together a quick (under 2 minute) test of our old mic, and all the settings of the new one. You can listen to the ~6MB WAV file here.
I'm delighted by the warm, even sound that the Snowball gives on settings 1 and 2 (cardioid pickup pattern - that's directional for all us non-techie types), and kind of astonished by all the noisiness apparent in the room when the omnidirectional pattern is used. I did a quick test last night of singing into it, and it sounds like it's going to work very well for that too. Happiness!!!!!!
