It’s not very often that I write a hardware review but I just bought a Yeti USB mic from Blue microphones and it’s definitely worthy of a report.
Why Buy a USB Mic?
My 24 inch iMac already has a built in webcam and microphone that gets the job done for most purposes. I use it for my everyday skype calls without any problems and I used it for all my recent interviews with Justin Brookes and Sean Mize at Rockstar Listbuilding.
Why did I choose the Yeti?
As always, I like to do a lot of research before I jump in and buy. I’d heard a lot about the Yeti so it was top of the shortlist. I started with my peer group who are already using the mic in the way I plan. Lynn Terry wrote a nice review over at Clicknews and Ed Dale has been raving about the mic during the Challenge 2010.
Paul Colligan also shot this video on how he uses the Yeti with his iPad to create awesome audio content on the fly.
So it’s definitely popular with the bloggerati and podcasters.
But I’ve also heard a lot about the Audio Technica AT2020. Clay Collins used the AT2020 to create the professional videos he used to launch the Presell Formula.
I also considered the blue snowball but quickly decided that I’d prefer the Yeti anyway so it was really a showdown between the Yeti and the AT2020. I checked out a lot of the Amazon reviews
The yeti finally won out on features, price and endorsement (isn’t social proof powerful?) and I haven’t looked back. The yeti was a little cheaper. I got if for about £100 (approx $160) on the Amazon UK store
It arrived in Ireland after just 2 days and I set it up right away.
I even took some Unboxing Images. (I always find unboxing videos such a waste of time, but some people seem to love them, for some reason).
Setting up the Yeti Mic
It was incredibly easy to set up and I was recording within a minute of opening the box. I just plugged in the mini USB and hooked it up to my iMac. System preferences opened up and I selected the Yeti for input and output. Boom – up and recording in 30 seconds!
I plugged my headphones into the inbuilt monitor and was taken aback by the warmth of the sound. I remember in 2005 when I first saw HDTV and could only describe the experience as “better than my eyes”. Crazy I know. But that’s how it felt using the yeti to record my voice. There’s no latency whatsoever (lag in the headphones) so the live feedback is insanely rich.
Drawbacks of the Yeti
I’ve been playing a little with the different settings to but I’m still optimizing those and I might provide an update later.
But there’s 1 massive problem that nobody else has mentioned so maybe it’s just my setup but this is important. Every single noise from my desk is being picked up. There’s no shock mount and my IKEA desk is hollow so the mouse noises and keyboard typing is really amplified by the mic. It’s so sensitive, it even picked up the fan noise (which I’ve never heard before). I’m going to try out some type of padding like a mouse mat and I need to play with the gain etc to reduce the background noise and hopefully I’ll be able to reduce the noise.
Final Verdict
Overall, I’m amazed at the quality of the mic and certainly for skype recordings, interviews and podcasts it’s simply stellar. For screencasting, unless I can fix the desktop noise, I think that maybe the AT2020 (with some kind of “anglepoise” style boom and a shock mount might be a better all-rounder.
Disclosure – this post is utterly littered with Amazon affiliate links so I might get paid if you click through and buy something from Amazon. Just keeping us honest – hope you don’t mind 
