If you’re into recording or podcasting and looking for a great microphone that doesn’t involve all the hassle of adapting a pro microphone to your computer (big trouble considering that you’ll need to get special audio cables and an outside audio card ) then you simply can’t go wrong with a snowball microphone.
In 2005 the Blue Microphones came out with their Snowball and that basically changed the way podcasters and music recorders went about their recording needs. See, back in the not-so-distant past most people had to go through a huge hassle of adapting their professional mics to their computers via a set up that required basically making a studio out of your computer by putting all sorts of gadgetry and wires on it. That was troublesome, but it worked. If you really wanted to record something or podcast on the regular basis with good quality you HAD to do this stuff. Though now you don’t.
With the introduction of Snowball Microphone everything involving a microphone, from recording to podcasting has gotten much, much easier, thanks to the release of the Snowball. You see, Snowball microphone is a relatively small mic (only 4′ in diameter) that you can easily plug into your USB port and start recording right there and then. On most operational systems Snowball microphone actually detects itself and takes less than a minute to install all drivers needed for smooth operation.
The first three pictures at the top is the Blue Snowball Microphone. As you can see it’s obviously stylish and pretty small. This particular snowball also offers three different modes (cardioid, cardioid -10dB and omni).
The back of this microphone only has a single port made for the USB wire which goes directly into your computer for plug-in so the installing process is very simple.
However, it’s important to bring to your attention that the snowball microphone isn’t going to turn your computer into a full recording studio, as it is a monophonic microphone, meaning that it is very good at recording a voice or an instrument, but it can’t be used very efficiently if you’re wanting to do talk-shows with different people (you could get two mics for this purpose) or record many instruments at once.
The price of this microphone is $99. You could get it off Amazon for about $70 for a used model too. Also, if you’re wanting to do lots of podcasting with this microphone I recommend you also get a pop filter for this mic, as it helps to reduce the “pop” effects from your voice (I’ll cover this in the next article about pop filter snowball microphone).