Blue Snowflake

This was yet another goodie I got for free at TeensInTech, but this one I won in a raffle.

Blue is known for their amazing high quality sound products, and I don’t think that the small budget snowflake is any exception. It has amazing quality sound, and  you can listen to a recording here: Snowflake Recording

Yet I did in fact encounter a problem. It seems that when it came, it was not assembled correctly, and I took it apart and turns out the motherboard with the microphone was not properly connected to the motherboard with the USB slot. After removing the bracket so it could connect properly, the thing finally worked. and as you can tell by that recording, this microphone can capture some REALLY good sound, but it does a great job capturing background noise

Sadly, the Snowflake is USB, so I can’t connect it to my (soon to arrive) Kodak Zi8, but after all, this thing was a freebie.

Overall, the Blue Snowflake is a high quality microphone great for chatting and some recording, but it is definitely not studio grade, and the price of $80 is questionable compared to what I’m getting here, with the failed factory assembly and the background noise.

Snowflake Webpage

Altec Lansing OrbitM

I recently attended the TeensInTech conference, which was quite fun. But they also gave out so maby goodies, that I paid $35 to go and came back with more than $100 of free stuff and I got to meet Steve “The Woz” Wozniak. Worth it? Ya. One of the things they gave away was the Altec Lansing OrbitM portable speaker. And it’s worth far more than the money I paid for it.

The design is overall very simple and elegant.

As you can tell, it is very small and cylinder shaped. It plugs in through a standard 3.0mm jack on and iPod or mp3 player. It also comes with an adapter to plug it into the 2.5mm Jack on a cell phone. It runs on 3 AAA batteries and even comes with this convirnient carrying case, complete with caribiner.

The unit comes with a slip of paper that says to turn off all base or treble enhancement settings. I must agree with them!
The sound is full and deep. The tiny little thing can go really loud too! The sound is just simply pleasing, and you don’t need a small speaker preset to get great sound out if this thing.

Basically, this is probably one of the best speakers of it’s size in current existence. It usually runs for $40, but they were given out fir free at the Teens In Tech Conference, held annually. This speaker totally rocks, and I got it for free!