Well I always through that the whole techno babble in podcasts are bullshit. But I understand it now.
I was thinking about starting my own Podcast project for while. And the first recording trial with my macbook have been promising. But as you can imagine after five minutes my inner geek arose. You can here the fan and even the hard disk. That is a no go. So I need a new mic.
No problem, your not evil friend will help you. And he tells me that I want to buy a Snowball from Blue. So and now I need reviews. Well a couple of blog entries and youtube convince me that it is what I was looking for. USB, three different recording modes and it nice looking as well.

An impulse trigger by a Pavlov reflex build up during the ancient days of the dot com era I fire up ebay. £100, fuck, I am not going to pay that. So what are the alternatives? My unimaginable creativity assures me that amazon will come to my rescue. And £79 that’s fair. Rethink, no that is not helpful in this stage.

Fuck, what normal shop has four weeks delivering time. Whatever!

And as I am asking after the four weeks where my mic is. I get the reply that “the dog eat my mic”(almost).

The whole thing with the single mic was a poor idea anyways. So get yourself a mixer. Ah there is my inner geek again. Ok, you might want to buy a condenser mic so you need 48V-phantom voltage. But at least four.

Oh I think four is too much. At least the £300 just for the mixer are. But after another 20 min I found what I need, a belkin (BELKIN! was always known for brilliant audio equipment ) mixer. Ipod dock, USB, 2 channel phantom power compressor sounds pretty nice. And the £129 also.

So I hop into the local maplin and orbit the audio department. There it is. Ok, I am buying it but what’s with the mic. Hm, this is £100, to much. I am willing to spend the money for one of those at the moment. I am not going to need that anyway. So this is £40 there is one for £20 and there, yes , £10, perfect. I am taking two. They are dynamic, not that every second blog post I read said don’t dynamic mic they are noisy and too quiet. Again they are perfect.

So of corse the noise level of the mic was so high that I did not get anything usable out of it. So I was stuck

Now after about a month I decided to get an proper mic. I bought myself a proper mic, a condenser mic from a small chinese company called sE electronics for about £90. And I have to say the sE100 is well worth the money. It is crisp, it is not noisy, it is just a good mic.

If you want to do some audio recordings, do yourself a favor and don’t try saving on the mics.

J