Well, I got caught up in a refund battle with a local music store. To make a long story short, I didn't win the refund battle and like Matt, I had never heard any good reviews of USB mics. However, I ended losing the refund battle and had a choice of receiving a very good value of merchandise to dollar compromise with the local music store by accepting a Blue Microphone Snowball.

I lost the battle and won the war. I have been completely satisfied with the sound, ease of operation, build quality and absolutely seamless setup and operation of the unit with Windows 7 and every DAW I have. I have used it with Audacity, BIAB, RealBand, Studio One 3.5 Professional without a hitch or complaint.

I have had many interfaces and they all require drivers and setup. Not a big deal but not always seamless setup and playing in the beginning. Not every recording I make is a serious, commercial release. In fact, that's fairly rare. I do spend several hours each day using my computer for audio production whether it's developing chord progressions, playing along to accompaniment tracks I've input, trying some new technique I've learned here on the forum or with Studio One Pro, songwriting or just recording guitar riffs and chord progressions. I've also been working on learning better guitar and also playing with recording 'quality' User Tracks recently. This Snowball Mic is absolutely marvelous for these tasks. I do not keep an audio interface connected all the time and have several different interfaces that I use for different projects according to the number of inputs necessary for my project. The Snowball allows me to plug it in, it's powered by USB so I am up and recording as quickly as my DAW or BIAB starts up. I can mic my acoustic guitar or do vocals without any hassle and on these non-critical projects, I spend my time in my DAW recording and not over on the drivers page or in Windows Audio trying to get everything working together.

I have a decent mic closet that has Wireless Mics, dynamic mics and condenser mics including Shure SM58, SM57, Sennheisers, AKG and other name brand mics as well as more than a few off brand models. I have a fairly expensive large condenser mic but unless I'm doing serious recording, I always just plug this Snowball in and spend my time making music rather than frustrations. I use it 90% of the time and 5% of the time I'll use a Zoom H5 interface leaving only 5% of my time needing serious higher end hardware and mics.

So, unless you have need for broadcast quality, mastered recordings for commercial releases,

I recommend:

Blue Microphone Snowball

Matt, Here's your first positive review..... ;=)


Last edited by Charlie Fogle; 03/25/18 11:57 AM.
BIAB Ultra Pak+ 2024:RB 2024, Latest builds: Dell Optiplex 7040 Desktop; Windows-10-64 bit, Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz CPU and 16 GB Ram Memory.