KVR Audio

Chungas Revenge · Post by **Chungas Revenge** » Mon Apr 02, 2007 12:52 pm

Thinking of getting a Samson C01U USB mic for use with me lappy.

Has any one any experience of the Samson or USB mics in general.

What are they like for latency

Thanks for any reccomendations/ warnings

Ian

smidijack · Post by **smidijack** » Mon Apr 02, 2007 1:02 pm

Please don't take this the wrong way, but if you are even considering a USB mic, let alone one "made" by Samson (?), I'm sure it will work just fine for you. Good luck w/your lappy!

jupiter8 · Post by **jupiter8** » Mon Apr 02, 2007 1:10 pm

One thing i always wondered about those things is: you must use ASIO for a decent latency,right ? You can only have one ASIO driver at the same time,right ?

So how can you hear what you're doing ?

Chungas Revenge · Post by **Chungas Revenge** » Mon Apr 02, 2007 1:52 pm

smidijack wrote:Please don't take this the wrong way, but if you are even considering a USB mic, let alone one "made" by Samson (?), I'm sure it will work just fine for you. Good luck w/your lappy!

So they're not very good then (esp. the Samson variety)

jupiter8 wrote:One thing i always wondered about those things is: you must use ASIO for a decent latency,right ? You can only have one ASIO driver at the same time,right ?

So how can you hear what you're doing ?

Exactly thats what I dont understand.

Vegetarian · Post by **Vegetarian** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 7:31 am

I wouldn't expect a USB mic to be fantastic quality, although some respectable manufacturers also make them like Rode and Blue so they can't all that bad. I guess it depends what you want to do with it as to whether it'll be suitable or offer satisfactory results - my guess would be that they're just fine for vocal work.

jupiter8 wrote:So how can you hear what you're doing ?

I would have thought you could still use your headphone amp on the laptop depending on the drivers, but don't quote me on that. Somebody will need to verify it

edit: first stop, the product manual; I'd be suprised if you can't download it

krushing · Post by **krushing** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 8:20 am

I suppose the one made by Blue might be the only one actually worth a shit (and even then, not too impressive)...the Røde one's called Podcaster, which probably establishes it's level of quality pretty well.

Angst Queen · Post by **Angst Queen** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 1:34 pm

The guy at the music store I get all my stuff from demo'd one of the Rodes for me when I got my yamaha HS80's. It's hilariously dodgy, but if you want to podcast, it's easy to use.

USB is generally pants, though. I can't imagine mics would be that great through it, considering sometimes my USB ports hate even running my keyboard.

Chungas Revenge · Post by **Chungas Revenge** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 1:44 pm

Yeah Im going to the shop on Saturday try one out ..lets see how bad they are.

CorporationMike · Post by **CorporationMike** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 11:07 pm

I actually own the Samson C01U USB mic (among others) and I find it has surprisingly good sound and almost no latency. It's fantastic for quickly getting down ideas.

jakob · Post by **jakob** » Sat May 05, 2007 7:55 pm

I just got the t.bone sc450 usb 3 days ago. It's my first more "serious" mic (used a simple desktop mic before, see http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=158894)

http://www.thomann.de/gb/the_tbone_sc450_usb.htm

It was easy to set up on WinXP (both home and pro): no drivers needed, was recognized automatically - supposedly it's the same for mac. I'm happy with it, it's better than the desktop mic. However, I have to use asio4all in order to use it. Asio4All can handle several sound devices. Another thing that I am currently dealing with is that, strangely, it is behaving differently on my laptop and my desktop. On my desktop, it picks up a LOT of the room ambience, and that sucks. This doesn't happen on the laptop. I don't know if the laptop just provides less "juice" to USB (had it running on the power cable though, not battery), or what. It's not that the signal is weaker on the laptop. Clearly, the signal/room ratio is much worse on the desktop.

I hope I get this problem solved, because I got the USB mic in order to avoid getting an extra sound card (have none with phantom power, XLR), plus the ability to move the mic from laptop to desktop, wherever I happen to make music.

If anybody has any idea on why that could be, I would much appreciate it!

jakob · Post by **jakob** » Thu May 10, 2007 5:46 am

Update!

I found out why the mic had such different recording quality on the desktop - a stupid mistake I made: I still had my old desktop mic plugged in and it was also picking up sound. Sometimes solutions are so obvious (obvious as in standing right there on my desk!).

I might make two recordings to show you the difference between my old desktop mic and and the sc450. Here is a demo of the desktop mic: http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=158894

jakob · Post by **jakob** » Fri May 11, 2007 5:41 am

As promised, here are two recordings comparing my old desktop mic and the new t.bone SC450 USB:

desktop mic
t.bone SC450 USB

I should add that I hand-built a little "sound booth" (a card board box with padding inside) so the mic pics up much less room sound, giving it an even bigger advantage over the desktop mic. I think the difference is quite obvious and I am happy with the results

Cheers

Jakob

USB Mics ..Any Good ?