• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
    • Stephen Foskett
      • My Publications
        • Urban Forms in Suburbia: The Rise of the Edge City
      • Storage Magazine Columns
      • Whitepapers
      • Multimedia
      • Speaking Engagements
    • Services
    • Disclosures
  • Categories
    • Apple
    • Ask a Pack Rat
    • Computer History
    • Deals
    • Enterprise storage
    • Events
    • Personal
    • Photography
    • Terabyte home
    • Virtual Storage
  • Guides
    • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • The iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • iPad Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • Toolbox
      • Power Over Ethernet Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix WWN Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder DOS Batch File
    • Linux Logical Volume Manager Walkthrough
  • Calendar

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Apple / Review: Blue Snowball USB Microphone

Review: Blue Snowball USB Microphone

March 31, 2010 By Stephen 2 Comments

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.

You might also want to read these other posts...

  • Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying…
  • Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!
  • Ranting and Raving About the 2018 iPad Pro
  • What You See and What You Get When You Follow Me
  • Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

Filed Under: Apple, Features, Personal, Terabyte home Tagged With: Apple, audio, Blue Microphones, featured, Garage Band, Gestalt IT, Infosmack, Logitech, OS X, podcast, Snowball, System Preferences, Tech Field Day, VMware Communities Roundtable, Wired magazine

Primary Sidebar

An unlimited-length file name is a file. The content of a file is its own best name.

Jef Raskin

Subscribe via Email

Subscribe via email and you will receive my latest blog posts in your inbox. No ads or spam, just the same great content you find on my site!
 New posts (daily)
 Where's Stephen? (weekly)

Download My Book


Download my free e-book:
Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts!

Recent Posts

Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From Vroom

November 28, 2020

Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply

October 18, 2020

Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1

September 22, 2020

Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs

September 21, 2020

Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

September 10, 2020

Remove ROM To Use LSI SAS Cards in HPE Servers

August 23, 2020

Test Your Wi-Fi with iPerf for iOS

July 9, 2020

Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!

May 29, 2020

What You See and What You Get When You Follow Me

May 28, 2019

GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But They’re Almost Done)

April 6, 2019

Symbolic Links

    Featured Posts

    Infographic: Real-World Port Throughput Relative To Thunderbolt (Formerly Light Peak)

    February 21, 2011

    Why Big Disk Drives Require Data Integrity Checking

    December 19, 2014

    Thinking About Storage In a New Way, From Cloud to Flash, with Dropbox and Fusion-io

    July 23, 2013

    Mac OS X Lion Adds CoreStorage, a Volume Manager (Finally!)

    August 4, 2011

    The iPhone Revolution 10 Years Later

    January 9, 2017

    From LAN Manager and SMB to CIFS: The Evolution of Prehistoric PC Network Protocols

    March 22, 2012

    Datacenter History: Through the Ages in Lego

    October 22, 2013

    What’s (Still) Wrong With Dropbox For Business

    April 17, 2013

    A Complete List of VMware VAAI Primitives

    November 10, 2011

    It’s Time To Speak Out Against Sexism In IT Recruiting

    May 6, 2013

    Copyright © 2021 · Log in