USB mics

C asked about USB mics, the Blue Snowball and the AKG Perception since he was on a budget. I asked him to be careful of hiss as some buyer's comments indicated, and also my bad experience with the M-Audio Mobile Pre. Pointed him to the Tascam US-144, which seems to be not only frame-accurate but also quite low noise and has low latency monitoring. Tested today with inputs trimmed for balanced line level signal output from the Yamaha AW4416, max noise level was a sample value of 3 == better than -80 dB. Of course, the digital SPDIF input is even better, with the max noise sample value being 0! For the time being, C has borrowed A's US-144.