Microphones and Audio Information

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Microphones and Audio Information

I just saw a couple of comments on my post Recommended End of Year eLearning Tools Spending? that were asking about quality differences between a Blue Snowball mic and SHURE mics. While I wouldn't know the specific answer to this off the top of my head, I thought I'd show what I do to find a pretty close answer and some people who I could easily ask.

I start by going to eLearning Learning and then I search for something like audio which gets me quickly to a page that's a bunch of great posts and other items all about Audio in eLearning. The keywords on the left are highly related to audio as well, so I'll drill down to pages on Audio Voiceover or Audio Microphone. On the Audio Microphone page I scroll down to the Best of Posts and see a bunch of great posts:

Of course you could cheat and search just for Snowball and/or Shure and find some reviews. And make sure you read about creating the mini-sound booth shown below.

2 comments:

Vic Uzumeri said...: One useful addition to the discussion is Blue Microphone's Icicle adapter.

It allows you to hook up almost any xlr microphone - Shure and anyone else's.

At $52.57 on Amazon.com., it is a big flexibility boost.; 11/04/2009 01:40:00 PM
Lisa said...: Well, after spending a lot of time reading articles, listening to recording and talking to sales reps... it seems that the best mic for recording voice overs for e-learning is the Audio-Technica 2020. Do you disagree?

It seems the other leading ones have slight downfalls... the Blue Mic is good quality for the price but has problems with the levels.

I have a SHURE mic and I have noticed some very low buzzing noises.

I think the Samson C01U might be a close second but some sample recordings seem to come in second place to recordings using the Audio-Technica.

I'm open to other opinions.; 11/04/2009 08:51:00 PM