Samson Q2U USB/XLR Dynamic Microphone Recording and Podcasting Pack (Black)

I’ve had this microphone for 3-4 years and it works perfectly. I only recently purchased another one because of my wife. She has her own PC setup now and she loves the sound and quality of my microphone. It’s better than most other major brands and keeps its quality over time. 3-4 years later and it still sound like I’m in their brains when talking on games and discord. I’d buy another once mine breaks or wears out

Buy it. If you're a beginning voice actor, streamer - whatever - this is the perfect starter microphone. In fact, I'd argue that you may get better results with this microphone than a more expensive one if you don't yet have a professional setup. Sound quality is great, it's lightweight, and feels nice to hold.

I’m a professional podcaster with over 500 episodes under my belt, and I’ve been using this mic for years. In fact, I bought this extra one so my wife and I could record some audio projects together. Sure, there are more expensive mics out there, but you can’t go wrong with this Samson if you’re on a budget. My podcast sounds great, so why should I spend more when the Samson delivers every time?

I love this microphone, but I encountered some issues when connecting it to my computer via USB. I tested it on two different high-end laptops, carefully following all the steps to ensure it would work, including adjusting the audio and mic settings. However, the microphone’s sound quality during recording was disappointingly poor—it sounded like a phone call. I even tried connecting it through an adapter to another port on my laptops, but that didn’t solve the issue. The sound remained terrible. Surprisingly, when I connected the microphone to my iPhone 11 via an adapter, it worked perfectly with no issues at all. While the microphone is lovely and delivers outstanding audio quality, I wish it were easier to use directly with my computer. To work around this, I connected the mic to my phone and installed software that turns my phone into a ‘microphone’. This allowed me to record on my computer using audio routed through my phone (while it was connected to the Q2U) and it worked flawlessly.

I love this thing. I cannot gush about this thing enough. I used a fancy and expensive xlr mic for a long time but the sound software, drivers, and audio interface were a constant and tedious balancing act to get the perfect sound. That is the ideal setup for recordings but it was often a nightmare and a half to make sure everything was tweaked correctly when just calling friends or playing games online.This mic offers the best of both worlds. I have the option to run it through the fancy stuff via xlr for recordings or just plugging it into the USB and calling friends without worrying about software settings, or if the audio interface is making a funny sound, or worrying about all the open sound software changing the performance of your game, or the processing stuff causing a delay if you need close to real time vocal call outs.I would also recommend this over mics like the blue yeti (which I also own). Blue makes good mics, but it is a condenser mic. Condenser mics pick up EVERYTHING, which is great in a very nicely controlled recording setting, but very bad with keyboards, mice, roommates, if you have AC/heat running, a window open, anyone in the entire house talking at any point in time.This is a dynamic mic. It is less sensitive overall, and tries to pick up sounds only from about half a foot in front of it while being less sensitive to sounds behind and to the side of it. It will still pick up some background noise, but nowhere near to the extreme as a condenser mic. If background noise is a problem, you can use one of the many, many, many softwares to cancel out unwanted noise in real time.If you want the most simple and idiot-proof noise blocker without installing super complicated sound engineering software with crazy NASA style control panel settings, try "noise blocker" by "closed loop labs". You "record" a noise like your AC/heater/fan or keyboard and mouse clacking, and it will "delete" those noises in real time. Your friends will thank you.

Super easy to set up, sounds great, have gotten many compliments since purchasing

I'm fairly impressed with this microphone. I plugged it into my laptop (a Macbook Air, but running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because I really dislike MacOS). It was automatically detected and picked as the default input device. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out why sound wasn't coming out before I realized there's an on/off switch. Sigh. Turning it on didn't work. More sigh. Turns out, it needs to be turned on when it's plugged in, then the on/off switch works as a mute just like you'd expect.I've played with it some both as a digital source and an "analog" mic, and it works, again, exactly like you'd expect. It picks up my voice really well, and doesn't pick up any background noise. I'm just in a cluttered office here, not some professional sound studio. I'm simply using USB, not the XLR cable and a real mixer. And it works exceedingly well. It has some real mass to it, so it feels like it's well made. And the volume up/down buttons Just Work on my Linux machine.The audio monitor output also works well; I plugged in my Sennheiser PXC-550 headphones using their wired connection, and not only does all the background noise I can hear (several computers with fans running, etc) go away, but I get what seems to be zero-latency feedback of my voice. I'm quite happy about that.For the fun of it, I moved over to a Windows machine and tested the same - it works just as well there. But who wants to do anything important with Windows? :)Overall, I'm happy with this. Off to record some training material now, and maybe even start up a podcast!

Excellent microphone. Good for small-budget