Recently I have been taking part in a number of PodCasts, mainly relating to technology but more specifically the Apple range of products. I have been happily using the built in microphone on both the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air with Skype and all was okay, or so I thought.

It was during a recent RoundTable event I was advised that the audio quality was way from perfect, in fact it was pretty appalling. Now I have never really been into the whole Audio / Video thing and wasn’t at all sure where to begin.

So I did what any computer literate user does these days I hit Google. Well there were pages and pages of information and I still didn’t know where to start so I turned to Twitter and tweeted for advise. Well within minutes I had about 20 replies all pointing to different options with advise as to what people liked and didn’t like about them. Then a friend from ScreenCastsOnline and Mac 20 Questions, Wayne Priestley, came to the rescue by suggesting the Snowflake USB microphone from Blue Microphones.

The first thing I liked about the Snowflake was the price (£49.99). A lot of the other microphones that had been recommended were in the £100-£300 price range and a little rich for my pockets. The other real winner was that it was a USB microphone, which meant that I didn’t need a mixing deck, which is a scary thing apparently with lots of buttons and sliders that adds another £100+.

So there are cheaper microphones but I didn’t want one that was part of a headset as I use a rather good pair of Bose headphones plus all the advice was to avoid them because the audio quality can be adversely affected if like me you enjoying breathing. The Snowflake seemed to me to be the middle ground.

The microphone arrived yesterday afternoon and last night I set it up, a 30 second job. I followed the quick guide on configuring it, which basically involves changing the input device to the new microphone opposed to the built in one, and I was done. I had tweeted earlier in the day that the microphone had arrived and a few kind souls volunteered to test it out with me. Wayne Priestley was the first and we chatted for about an hour and the feedback on the audio quality was that it sounded very crisp and clear. Then David Allen from Mac 20 Questions setup a conference call and the three of us chatted.

The feedback was good all round and David even recorded a section for me and sent it over so I could listen to it myself. I must say I was impressed with the quality. There is another RoundTable scheduled for this Friday, and with my new microphone I feel I am ready to participate without feeling I am messing it up for everybody else. All in all I would say a “Good Buy”.