Recording - January 2018 - 50

IOS
MUSIC
TOOLS

NEW GEAR
FOR THE
NEW YEAR
REVIEWS BY MIKE METLAY & JUSTIN PERKINS

ur January issue gets to subscribers just
before the holidays, so it's a great chance to
include products that didn't make it into our
December Holiday Buyer's Guide. Here's a selection
of cool new iOS-friendly hardware and software
that's worth your consideration.

Blue Raspberry
$199.99; www.bluemic.com
Blue Microphones has been
making iOS-centric mics for quite
a while, and has gotten really
good at it. So it should come as
no surprise that the new Raspberry
is equally at home on conventional
computers and iOS devices.
The Raspberry is a 14mm electret
condenser mic and headphone
amp built into a compact, sturdy,
and very portable enclosure,
50

RECORDING January 2018

roughly 2 x 2 x 6 inches and weighing just
over a half pound. That includes a built-in
swiveling mic stand that provides surprisingly
effective insulation from thumps and rumble
when set on a desktop, folding against the
mic when not in use.
The Raspberry comes with a screw-on
mic stand adapter, USB-A and Lightning
adapter cables, and a drawstring
carry pouch. It's also available in
a package called Raspberry Studio
($219.99), which includes licenses
for PreSonus Studio One Artist and
iZotope Ozone Elements-a solid
suite of entry-level recording software for macOS and Windows that comes with a set of free
application templates to get you started. For iOS users, the
Raspberry itself is a Core Audio compliant mic that works with
pretty much any recording app.
The mic offers side knobs for headphone volume and mic
gain, the latter with a press-to-mute function. A front LED above
the Blue logo is green when in use, red when muted, and the
rear has a USB Micro-B port and a headphone minijack. The
mic gain knob provides up to 40 dB of gain, so it works well
for close and intimate vocals or for more wide pickup of loud
instruments. Interestingly, the headphone volume knob works
in reverse-you turn it to the left to turn it up. Maybe the idea
was to be mirror-symmetric with the gain knob?
The capsule has a wide cardioid pattern, with off-axis rejection
that's smooth but not very dramatic. Proximity effect is milder
than with other cardioid mics; you have to really get up close
on the grille to get the same "radio announcer voice" that
some other mics do. Tonality is balanced, with a more
mellow top end than is common on cheap condensers, with
the medium-diaphragm capsule striking a nice balance between
small-diaphragm precision and large-diaphragm character.
Blue also makes much of a new feature called the Internal
Acoustic Diffuser (IAD), which according to diagrams on the
website is essentially a tiny array of curved diffuser elements
mounted inside the grille, right behind the capsule. In theory,
this scatters reflections and off-axis sound for better focus on the
voice being recorded; there's no way to measure how much
of the Raspberry's nice-sounding and workmanlike response is
due to the IAD, but we can't argue with the end result.
The headphone amp has a 32Ω impedance and sounds
great with lower-impedance phones, and has built-in
zero-latency mic monitoring (a wise choice for mics in this
realm of application). It records and plays back in 16 or 24
bits, at 32/44.1/48 kHz.
I worked with the Raspberry for a couple of weeks doing vocal
recording, simple acoustic demos, and streaming broadcasts,
and found it a very easy-to-use mic that delivered solid results.
On iOS apps, the Raspberry was recognized instantly and
provided great recordings right away. All in all, this is a great
little mic for on-the-go recording; it's easy to keep with you,
works like a charm, and sounds great.-MM

http://www.bluemic.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - January 2018