Microphone Review – Alesis USB Mic

Seeing as how I’m recording hypnosis .mp3 files, having a good microphone is important. The only issue is, I value my mobility, and my primary computer, like many Americans these days, is a laptop. In making the switch to a laptop, I gave up a lot of things, like the plethora of inputs and a good soundcard that having pci or pci-e slots can offer.

To top it all off, ever since I had my motherboard replaced last year (Hooray for extended warranties with in-home service) my sound jacks have both been very noisy.

Where does that leave someone looking to get good sound quality?

I was faced with two options. One is to buy either an external sound card or mixer that hooks into my laptop via USB. The other is to skip the middle man and buy a USB microphone.

Given that I don’t need the finest control or quality, and I’m buying from a value perspective, I went with a USB microphone. This allows me a much easier set up if I’m recording a session elsewhere, and at a price range of $50-$150 is much cheaper than buying a USB-XLR interface or some other mixer box.

If you’re wondering what kind of benefit you’ll see over using a cheap headset or desktop mic, you’ll probably be quite impressed after some fiddling with levels and microphone positioning. I bought an Alesis USB mic - a condenser microphone with a cardioid pickup pattern.

The condenser part means that it is essentially a big capacitor, and vibrations strike one of the capacitor’s plates, the change in distance changes the capacitance of the system, which is measured to create a signal. This is different from a dynamic microphone, which relies on a diaphragm moving within a magnetic field to create an electric current (The opposite of a speaker). Typically, a condenser microphone will give a better reproduction than a dynamic mic. Many of the small microphones in electronics are electret mics, a special kind of condenser, but on average their sound quality usually suffers (due to size and expense) in comparison to a larger mic.

The cardioid pattern means that it picks up sound best when it comes from in front of one side of the microphone. This allows some leeway in background noise.

If you need the best quality sound reproduction, there are much better options with correspondingly higher costs, but for quality that is just ‘okay’ I don’t think you’ll go wrong with the Alesis USB microphone. It retails in the US for $99.

I Think I Have My Answer

Over the weekend I went to DejaVu with some friends to see Tony Lucero's erotic hypnosis show.

The evening was mostly enjoyable. We got in just as volunteers were coming onstage and were there for the whole show, which lasted about an hour.

As I surveyed the volunteers on stage, I began to sort them into a few catergories. There were the eager to please, the doubters, the uncomfortable, and the general poor responders. My intuitions were well founded as the three I had tagged as doubters were off the stage during the first set, the uncomfortable left during the set where the hypnotist suggested they try the imaginary weed he was handing them, and the eager to please girls had outrageous responses to his suggestions throughout several sets.

What probably surprised me the most throughout this performance was how little Lucero had to do in order to get them to follow along. This is the wonderful thing about having a self selecting group. On top of the fact that they volunteered to be on stage, they all came from an audience who came to see an erotic hypnotist, including the bachlorette party that showed up to the club in a van covered with penis drawings.

The other thing that surprised me was a sort of awe that some of the volunteers had for what was happening. I suppose I've seen similar responses in my vanilla, one-on one hypnosis, and it makes sense that the shock would be slightly bigger when rather than say, having your hand locked in the air you're working your way towards an orgasm without any touching.

This was sort of concerning to my friends who have the "They're in his power" view. One of my friends even likened it to "mind-rape of the feeble" and said her faith in humanity was ruined by the way the audience responded to it.

I thought it seemed to me the people on stage were having a wonderful time; particularly the girl with the cucumber halfway down her throat and the woman compelled to dry hump anyone who congratulated her after the show.