Hi, I am Bruce Naylor with the Frugal tech show. We are doing a little video here about my Blue SnowBall microphone. You know I get a lot of people asking about the microphone that I use and so we thought that we just do a little bit of video about the microphone.
I got it back in May, got through Amazon.com and paid around $99.00 for it. Now the reason I select this microphone is, I went online, did some research and was looking for a USB microphone but something that was a little bit better quality than this, something you would get in a headsets or something like that. And looking after the price and the features and the value, I have to say that I think that the Blue SnowBall microphone was a real good purchase.
Now, you either going to really love the looks of this thing or you are going to really hate it, one of the two. It reminds me one of those old fashioned microphones that was used back in the 1950’s and it is actually exasperating, gosh, you know in the 50’s but it has like a big screen around it. You can actually get that as an accessory, it is called the ringer. So, as a $99.00 USB microphone, I happened to think that this is really cool looking. It is about 10 inches tall on a little three-legged stand here and it does raise up lower, up and down.
Let me go ahead and just tightened up this shot on this thing here. So, we will kind of go ahead and zoomed in on the microphone.
There is a 3 position switch in the back. The microphone is a condenser microphone with 2 cardioids in it. The 3-switch position, basically one switch is kind of a very uncolored sound, “what you see is what you get.” The second switch position tends to mute the microphone a little bit so when you are around very loud sound sources, it will take care of that. And the third position is really great. I think the best for voice podcasting and that sort of thing.
I want to turn around the front of the microphone here. You will see that you have this LED light up here that lets you know that the microphone is receiving power from the USB port. And like I said, it is round. It is actually sprucing through the stands, sprucing to the base right here. So, that is kind of the physical description of it. It does work with the Mac, you know I will just go ahead and tighten back up here. It does work with the Mac OS10; it works with Window’s XP.
With Vista, if they are manufactured after July of 2007, they are Vista compatible. What I have run into is yes, Vista detects it, knows it is there. I just cannot get any kind of real value level out of the Blue Snowball microphone with Vista. So, that has not been a very, very good experience but it does work great with the XP and OS 10.
It is a pretty substantial microphone. So it is not going to tip over very easy. You can use that very nicely with Grudge Band, Audacity, some more of those things but it is a great podcasting microphone. I think there is probably a lot of people are going to be looking for and want to use. And certainly a lot better microphone than what is built into things like Logitech S-9000 pro, a webcam and it is certainly lot better microphone than that, or the pick up on my Logitech microphone headset right here.
We are real happy with the Blue Snowball microphone. It is one of those things that very uniquely looking, you are either going to like it or you are not. I do not think there is really a middle ground on this, for about $99.00 available on Amazon.com. They might be able to give them a little cheaper right now.
Blues got some newer things coming out but this is really I think a very cool looking microphone. I like it and if you are looking for a USB microphone. Definitely consider the Blue Snowball microphone. I think you will be really happy with that investment. But if you are using this word to the wise, I did not have a lot of luck giving, some acceptable volume amount out of it and doing some research on the web, a lot of others have the same complaint. Maybe that is going to be a fix to the very, very near future.
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