The Blue Snowball is the size of a softball and packs killer sound performance

Over the last year I’ve really jumped into recording podcasts, from InfoSmack to the VMware Communities Roundtable. Since I work out of my home office, I’m also an avid audio and video conference user. I’ve long suffered listening to the inaudible and miserable microphones used by so many others, but my own gear wasn’t much better. Wanting better sound, I upgraded my Logitech microphone to the highly-regarded Blue Microphones Snowball desktop USB microphone. Here are my initial thoughts.

Tip: Although Blue Microphones enforces a “minimum advertised price” of $99, Amazon actually sells the Blue Snowball for under $75 with free shipping!

The Blue Snowball

Ironically, the Blue Snowball doesn’t actually come in blue. It’s a white softball-sized usb mic with three selectable audio modes. The Snowball has received great reviews (I first heard about it in Wired magazine) but since Gestalt IT handed out a few as door prizes at our first Tech Field Day in November the raves have been coming in from folks I know and trust.

The great eye of the Blue Snowball peeks out of the retail package

The Blue Snowball impresses from the start. It’s heavier than one would expect thanks to a cast metal housing. The bundled tripod is solid and stable thanks to three low and wide legs. The mic can be located by telescoping the tripod and tilting the Snowball mic itself. But the included USB cable is so burly that its weight tugs the mic out of alignment – I used a slimmer USB A-B cable instead.

The Snowball required no drivers in Mac OS X, setting up instantly. I was able to select it in System Preferences as the default mic, and set Skype to use it, too. I imagine it’s just as easy to use in Windows.

Of the three audio settings, I imagine most will leave the switch in position 1. Being a desktop mic, a directional pattern is most useful. Position 3 is great for recording group conversations, however.

Tip: In Mac OS X, Option-click on the audio slider in the menu bar to quickly select a mic!

How Does It Sound?

Although the Blue Snowball is much hyped in podcasting circles, I wanted to hear the difference for myself. I connected the Snowball and my old Logitech USB mic to my late 2009 iMac and matched the levels in System Preferences. I then recorded the following comparison in Garage Band using the “Male Voice” setting.

Personally, I like the full, rich sound of the Blue Snowball best. The Logitech isn’t as bad as I feared, but the internal iMac mic is just terrible.

An earnest plea: If you are using the internal mic on your computer to record podcasts or Skype, do us all a favor and invest in a halfway decent mic like the Snowball! Amazon sells the Blue Snowball for under $75!

Note: Some of these links include affiliate codes that help pay for this blog. For example, buying an Amazon Kindle with this link sends a few bucks my way! But I don't write this blog to make money, and am happy to link to sites and stores that don't pay anything. I like Amazon and buy tons from them, but you're free to buy whatever and wherever you want.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Review: Blue Snowball USB Microphone
This post was categorized as Apple, Features, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

This post is part of my series focused on switching from PC to Mac.

• How To Buy Discount Apple Computers
• Got Some AppleCare For Cheap
• Switch! or How the Mac (Finally) Won Me Over
• Switch Day 1: This Mac is Hot!
• Switch Day 58: Ten Pros and Cons of the MacBook Pro

• The MacBook Pro is much sturdier than the average PC notebook, and even somewhat better than the high-end machines I’ve used (like my replacement Dell XPS M1330)
• The machine is hot on the bottom when using it a lot, and even pretty hot on the top!
• The fan is really loud – much louder than I was expecting
• The MagSafe power cord is cute but very delicate – I’m not surprised at all that they break and burn right and left!
• The screen is gorgeous – I got the matte model rather than the glossy since I hate the bright reflections I always fight with on my other machines
• I wish the 15″ model I got had more than two USB ports – I just know I’m going to be swapping a lot more than I used to.  But the new Dell has only two ports, too – my old XPS M1210 had four!
• Since I got the older model, it included the Apple remote, which is cute
• Everything about this machine is classier and more elegant than any PC I’ve ever used, from the packaging to the case to the documentation to the power cord
• I hate the auto-dimming screen – it reacts WAY too fast, constantly dimming and brightening as my shadow falls over the left-side speaker grille. This was the first Mac feature to be disabled!

One really odd thing about this machine is that even though it’s a “Late 2007″ model, it was manufactured in April 2008!  Why on earth did Apple continue making the old model two months after it was replaced in February with the “early 2008″ version?

As for OS X Leopard, I’ve just begun exploring…

• Anyone who complains about UAC on Windows should try OS X – it interrupts just about as much but forces you to type in your password, too!
• I love the packaging system – everything is self-contained so you can just drag and drop or delete
• It took me the longest time to figure out how to be able to shut the lid and use the computer with an external monitor – turns out it always sleeps when you shut the lid but then wakes up again when you click the mouse or type on the keyboard
• The included applications look much more useful than the ones that ship with Vista, which themselves are far better than anything Microsoft bundled in the past – I can’t wait to use iMovie and Garage Band, and iPhoto seems just as good as Google’s Picasa
• I’m loving the included UNIX utilities – ssh and scp should be part of every operating system out of the box!
• It’s ridiculously hard to change the hostname – apparently you have to edit /etc/hostconfig by hand!  Do they expect that no regular people want to name their computer?!?
• Network setup beats Vista hands-down!  It correctly suggested that my wireless router was filtering based on MAC address, while Vista just said “can’t connect”
• I already installed Boot Camp and VMware Fusion with a Windows Vista partition – talk about easing the transition!

I’ll keep updating the blog with my experiences over the next few months.  As a reminder, I offer separate feeds for Enterprise Storage for those not interested in this topic, which will be posted in my Terabyte Home feed.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Switch Day 1: This Mac is Hot!
This post was categorized as Apple, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.