Good sub £50 mic?

[mrmagica]

Hi, using VC with a chinese USB headset that cost about $10. Even that works pretty great from 6 feet away or so.

However in search of even better accuracy at a distance, considering a better dedicated usb mic. Alot of discussion on array mics, read the wiki but not many recommendations of fairly cheap mics. I researched a bit and found two common types - Dynamic and Condenser..... anyone know which is more suitable for us?

Thing is quite hard to know what makes a good voice recognition at a distance! You can ready reviews on studio mics all day long but most of the features the money goes on we really don't care about!

I see in "Mr Wolf's" video he has a nice looking mic, likes like a samson or something....be quite interested to hear peoples views on $10 budget mics compared to more expensive "proper" studio mics....

[jitterjames]

No matter how expensive your microphone is, it is not going to work well when the person speaking gets too far away from the microphone, unless you have a very quiet room.  If you want to watch TV or listen to music and your mouth is far from the microphone, you can forget it.  You will need to have a means to reduce the volume.  If you have a button for that, great, but so far I have not found the button for the other people in my house talking.

If you have one lying around, you can try a ps3 eye.  I think it works OK from about 6-10 feet away if the room is relatively quiet.  I do not recommend buying one, just worth trying if you have one lying around.

A microphone that is more focused on sound coming from a single direction would be better than one that picks up everything, this is the idea of a microphone array, but they still don't do a great job (AFAIK) when there is a lot of competing noise.

[mrmagica]

Well I have my eye on a midrange USB studio mic, I'll do a comparison to my $10, 12 year old chinese headset I use at distance of upto 6 feet or so, which when in a quiet environment seems to hit 9 / 10 commands! Pretty impressive. I have high hopes for one of my knock off Smart USB panic buttons for the ambient noises!