To be honest I’ve never given much thought to USB mics, I never understood why you’d want one instead of a proper mic and interface. Then I was in the situation where I could buy a Blue Snowflake for just $20 and I opened up my mind a bit. Blue is a pretty respectable brand and strangely less than an hour earlier someone showed me the Blue Icicle which was pretty nice for what it is. The # 1 thing I liked about the Icicle was that there was zero effort required to get it working with a mac and condenser mic. The # 2 thing I liked about it was I could use the built-in headphone jack on the mac for monitoring, essentially using to interfaces at once, it worked just fine.
So a guy offered to sell me his Blue Snowflake for $20, (I think he needed booze or drug money) and that’s a pretty good deal even if I only ever need it once. So the dude that never thought much about USB mics now owns one.
http://www.bluemic.com/snowflake/
So now that I owned it, I needed to figure out if I had any actual use for it and if it sounded even marginally good. My expectations were low, but there are much worse things I could have spent the money on. Let’s look at some Pro and Cons of this particular mic.
Pros
- Very portable, small & lightweight
- Inexpensive
- Very simple to setup
- Sensitive condenser mic
Cons
- Only 16 bit/44.1kHz
- Gain is computer controlled (not that bad with ‘Sound Source’ for mac)
- Thin USB cable will eventually wear out
- Sound quality not as good as a real interface + mic
Possible Applications
- Pre-production demos
- Field recorder for ‘found sounds’ out of my studio
- Skype
- Better mic for screencasting (tutorial vids for you guys)
So how does it sound? Well for under $100 I don’t expect much from anything. This is pretty decent I suppose but I didn’t directly compare it to a proper condenser mic at the time.
Also Interesting:
Hmm. I was curious about this thing, but the differences between the mac’s internal mic and the snowflake on the acoustic demo are practically inaudible. Maybe I’ll pass…
Really? I thought the difference was very obvious, even on laptop speakers. The snowflake sounds much more focused.
The internal mic had more room sound being picked up in a bad way because it bounces off the screen. Also it’s noisier, being so close to the moving parts of the laptop.
Groovy, I’ll have another listen, then? Maybe in my half-asleep state and two second of Neil Young I made a huge oversight.
I have mixed feeling about USB microphones, on the one hand they are incredibly convenient for a newcomer to the world of audio production but they also bypass a lot fo what needs to be learnt to make a basic good recording. in addition they limit future choice as they do not allow you to choose a different preamp.