I originally wrote this for my english class im taking at DeVry.

The Blue snowball microphone is a great microphone if you know how to set it up and if you buy it from the right place.
I purchased the blue microphone actually the worst way I could; it was terribly marked up. I purchased it on Apple’s website mainly because I knew what to expect in shipping times. Later I found out it was available on Amazon and other online retailers. There were no price comparisons on blue’s website which is terrible.
Overall Blue’s website isn’t something fun to navigate, all I knew is they were a brand that only made microphones and I wanted something affordable and slightly below studio quality. After you figure out their terrible trees of navigation you sometimes can find a product you’re looking for as I was told by a friend that the Snowball model was a very nice, cheap, and popular microphone. They list the online retailers with links that didn’t even go to the product I was looking at and even worse they were all sold at different prices and different markups in pricing.
Once I received the microphone and after flipping through the manual I found that it was pretty easy to set up. However it’s not very explicit in the feature set. There is a switch on the back that reads 1, 2, and 3 what they mean is only what they mean to you and your own interpretation because all the manual said was a bunch of technical jargon for figure it out yourself.
I ended up using setting ‘2’ most of the time. The settings are the same quality but the ‘2’ setting seems to not auto adjust the volume nearly as much as setting ‘1’. Setting ‘3’ seems to be more for being really close and loud with it because I’m extremely muffled while using setting ‘3’. It was really easy to use with my computer I simply plugged it in no installing drivers or any third party software or any other bull crap it just works, it’s all done and good!
The quality of the audio is always amazing and I couldn’t ask for better when I’m usually so hard to impress. The stand is made of some metal that appears to be unbendable or at least to my non-muscular self. Not only is there a ridiculous number of ways to rotate, extend, and bend the stand, all the joints don’t lose their sturdiness even after trying to wear them out for this paper.

Overall I think if you’re into gaming, podcasting, or any time where your audio quality needs to be decent you should buy this microphone on Amazon for a pretty cheap price compared to the other retailers. Play with the settings when you get it out of the box and once you’re set up once you’re good to go!