Best USB Mike

[stearman65]

Which USB mike is best for general use???
Stearman65

[steve]

What do you mean by "general use"?

[stearman65]

What do you mean by "general use"?

A good all rounder voice/instruments
Stearman65

[steve]

For recording vocals and acoustic instruments, the Samson C01U and C03U get good reviews.
If you are in Europe, the German company Thomann do some good "T-Bone" (their own brand) USB large diaphragm condenser microphones that offer very good value for money.

Large diaphragm condenser microphones are not usually very suitable for recording very loud sounds such as close mic'ing drums or guitar cabs. They also tend to be a lot more fragile than dynamic microphones, so they need handling carefully.

[gmatkin]

I've just bought a t bone USB mic but I'm having trouble getting much amplitude from it. I've turned up the Windows mixer gadget to max, and toggled the +20dB button, but still there's not enough signal to be any real use.

Are there any other volume controls I can go to to boost the signal please, or is there something else I should be doing?

I'm using this with Audacity using a PC running XP; I tried using it with my old (but quiet) laptop running Win2000 without any success at all!

If anyone can help, I would be most grateful.

Gav

[kozikowski]

<<<toggled the +20dB button>>>

All delightful things to do to an analog microphone, which the Samson and Thomann are not. The down side (one of many) of a USB microphone is that the MicPre and Analog to Digital converter are all folded into the microphone body. You get a finished, encoded performance bitstream at the end of the USB cable. If there are no software packages that claim they can tailor the characteristics of your particular microphone, you get what you got.

News Gathering microphones have the same problem. You can have perfect sound level, or you can have crystal clear, uncompressed sound, but not both. Everybody wants these microphones to deliver spot on sound levels in Audacity even when the live performance can easily produce four times and one quarter sound levels with no effort. Any singer can do that before breakfast.

Some microphones have built-in limiters to help, but a lot of performers turn them off after the first couple of performances. You can do a lot better by recording low and use the compressors and level tools in Audacity. Which I'm guessing is what your microphone is trying to do.

Koz

[steve]

I don't think that the Windows mixer controls have any effect on USB microphones. This should not be a problem though. If you are recording vocals you can get pretty close to the microphone (pop shield recommended).

Are there any switches on the microphone itself? (which model did you get?)

If you set the Audacity Preferences (in Edit Menu) to record in 32 bit (Quality tab) you should be able to boost the recorded track quite a lot using "Normalize" or "Amplify" without any loss of sound quality.

[gmatkin]

I've got the 440, and Audacity is set to 32-bits already.

If that's all we can do, I guess we've done what we can and we'll simply amplify it. I wonder whether noise will be a problem, but I guess it won't be. We'll see.

It sounds nice, I must say, if it does look rather quiet on-screen. Has anyone else met the same problem?

Gav

[kozikowski]

<<<Has anyone else met the same problem?>>>

Quite a number of others. I got ten forum search hits without trying hard.

Koz

[kozikowski]

<<<look rather quiet on-screen.>>>

Quiet On Screen can happen when you're looking at percentage waveforms. Percentage works OK in video, but audio tends to have problems with that. For example, 0.5 on the blue waveforms is 6dB which is barely noticeable to your ears. Half loudness to your ears is about -18 dB which works out to 12%. Can you even see 12% on that waveform?

Convert the waveform to dB with the menus under the little black arrow on the left. Most ears give up the good fight at about -60 or so.

Koz