The Samson Go Mic is billed as an "everywhere mic" for either podcasting or music. A beginner voice artist may indeed want to use it everywhere - including her own home.
I like the tones the Go Mic captures, and I'm grateful for the ones it leaves out. Eliminating noise has been my biggest recording challenge. I can't read poker-faced - not if I want to use my full vocal range. My voice has a rounder quality when I read with mouth held in a broad posture; facial expressions, too, contribute to an effective narrative read.
Unfortunately, this means that a headset will move back and forth against my jaw - and the sound may well be recorded. My former Logitech 350 headset made small clop-clop sounds, giving whatever I recorded an amateur quality. No such problem with the Go Mic!
Hear more in my review of this product now.
An Amazing Little Piece of Equipment
The Samson Go Mic is a diminutive condenser microphone with three settings: omni, cardioid, or cardioid -10dB.
At times I have been amazed at the things that I haven't heard in my recordings. I record in a small apartment in Seattle's University District - it's a studio in one sense of the word, but scarcely the soundproof kind. I was recording a poem in Audacity once when sirens wailed past my window. When I played the recording back, I noticed nothing but my own voice. (I do sometimes pick up very minor background noise, which can be edited out.)
The Go Mic comes with starter music-recording software and has a headphone jack for latency monitoring. It clips easily to a netbook, though I personally prefer to read with it lying flat. This way, I have my choice of postures. The set up means I'm more comfortable when I record, and this can translate into fewer retakes.
The frequency range of the Go Mic is listed as 20 Hz to 18 kHz. A musician might eventually want to graduate to something a little more... room-sized. A narrative artist, though, may never need to. Even if she does have a studio (of the kind that's made for recording and not living), she might well want one of these microphones for travel. It fits into a tiny case, at home in a purse or the pocket of a netbook sleeve.
Is it the best microphone available? When I compare price tags, my guess is no. But taking lifestyle into account, it's an amazing little piece of equipment. It is high-quality indeed for a microphone that can be bought for about $50 on Amazon.
Karen Weil
