In an effort to enhance geekCasual as well as my personal website (shameless plug) with voice-overs and podcast, I decided that I need to purchase a good quality, portable, easy to use microphone. After a bit of research, I picked up the Snowflake by Blue for about $35. Although not without its shortcomings, the snowflake looks like it will meet my needs.
The Snowflake is a very compact, very affordable USB desktop or laptop mount microphone. It comes with a 3 foot USB cable and, well, that’s all. In addition to having an attractive, slick appearance, it actual operates just as nice.
The Snowflake it truly plug-and-play. It requires no drivers and works on both PC and Mac. It has no special software, adjustments, or tweaks.
Okay, it looks nice; it’s easy to use; and it’s very portable, but how does it sound? For $35, it sounds great. Although I found the sound to be a bit “telephonic,” the quality is far better than that of any built in microphone or “plug into the microphone jack” device.
For dictation, podcasting, and general solo recordings, the snowflake performs great. It doesn’t pickup a ton of background noise, and it picks up no internal computer noise. I would not, however, recommend it for musical or multi-source recordings.
On to the negatives. There are no on/off, uni/omni, or volume switches on the microphone. As a matter of fact, there is nothing on the microphone. Everything must be controlled by whatever software you are using. Also, I’m not sure if it’s just the one that I ended up with, but the actual connection seems very sensitive. Just the vibrations from sliding my keyboard drawer shut causes the Snowflake to cycle connection when sitting on the desktop.
Geek Speak:
Technical Specs
- Transducer Type: Condenser, Pressure Gradient w/USB Digital Output
- Polar Pattern: Cardioid
- Sample/Word Rate: 44.1 kHz/16 bit
- Frequency Response: 35Hz – 20kHz
System Requirements
- Macintosh: Mac OSX; USB 1.0 or 2.0; 64MB RAM (minimum)
- Windows: Vista or XP; USB 1.0 or 2.0; 64MB RAM (minimum)
You should buy if – you are looking for a cheap, well made, better than average microphone for dictation or podcasting.
You should not buy if – you are looking for a high quality, versatile microphone to record music or round table type recordings.
[audio:http://www.geekcasual.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/snowflake.mp3|titles=Sample Recording]
If you have a Snowflake, let us know what you think. If you have a microphone that you think is better, tells us why.
