sE Electronics T2
Shure SM57
EV RE50B
Schoeps MK41/CMC6U
did not use any effects, save for a brickwall limiter at the tippy top, but I don’t think anything hit it. also some very subtle gain to roughly match the levels but mostly untouched.
also don’t run excessively long cables or run them alongside power. i did so you might hear the interference; note though that if you can hear environmental noise, that means it isn’t being masked by shitty hardware noise.
I’m not familiar with the YouTube Channel format you mentioned, but you can get great simple sound using a audio technica 803 lav mic paired with a little Tascam DR-10x.
Record 24-bit wav… add 3-4x compression and your pretty much all set. That’s probably about the cheapest pro-setup.
Blue’s USB offerings are ubiquitous because they are accessibly inexpensive and because Blue already had a reputation making high end mics for music. Personally, I think the Yeti sounds very poor, so I’d look for generic copies; i.e., how much worse can they be? They are all cheap electret capsules disguised as LDCs anyway.
Oh and don’t use a lav, if you can avoid it. They are fine for backup and portability if you need wireless, but they sound awful compared to a mic out front of you. You don’t listen to people by sticking your ear on their chest or side of their face. The placement is decidedly inferior; it gives you a nasty, throaty low-midrange, and any lav under $300-400 is a much greater offender of this.
IMO, no. If you can get the snowball on a good sale then its probably not that bad… but its big, ugly, and doesnt sound any better than other cheap USB mics in its price point.
I got this on a sale for 35 and just bought a cheap ass neewer arm and called it good.
If your room isn’t treated for sound / if you have background noise from computers, traffic or whatever, I would strongly suggest using a dynamic instead of a condenser mic.