Testing The Cheapest Mic on Amazon!! ASMR
Fun fact of the day:
Did you know that USB plug-and-play microphones are a relatively recent technology??
The first microphone ever made dates back to 1876. It was called the liquid microphone and was invented by Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson. However, it was not practical and became obsolete after the carbon microphone was developed!!
Most microphones from the 1870s all the way to the 1990s shared a similar limitation: they were not standalone devices and required audio interfaces or mixers to record digitally or to boost the signal!!
But then 2005 came around, and something interesting happened. The company you might know today as Logitech’s microphone division released a brand new design called the “Blue Snowball”!!
Now, all of a sudden, a kid with an acoustic guitar and 0 knowledge about microphones could buy a Snowball for 60 bucks, hook it up to a laptop, and show all their friends on Facebook how mediocre they are at playing and singing!!
Later in 2009, Blue released their flagship USB mic, the “Blue Yeti”, which is the microphone this video was recorded on!! I think the Yeti needs no further introduction!!
Another interesting fact is that BLUE is actually an abbreviation, it stands for “Baltic Latvian Universal Electronics”. The microphones the company made were actually manufactured in Latvia from 1995 all the way to 2004, but then production moved to mostly China and a small portion was made in the United States!!
Some of you audio history nerds might say, “Hey, you dum-dum, Samson actually made their C01U USB microphone in 2003, which was two years before Blue!!” And yes, that’s true. However, Blue were the ones who popularized the concept and really refined it. The Samson mic was commercially available, but it didn’t take off like the Snowball. So it did not create a cultural impact like the Snowball and Yeti!!