G'day, Gary from simple audio tips Are you looking for an economical way
to connect your condenser or standard cardiod/ dynamic microphone to a Computer
Well the Swamp X USB might be just what you looking for let us check out what to get
in the box and also the quality of this unit and how it compares to the ART USB Dual pre
We are going to have a good look inside in a minute I thought I would first do an
unboxing video so you would be able to see for yourself what you get with the product.
That's basically all the packaging
and as you can see on the back here there is are
Velcro tie now they would be to hold
the microphone against a microphone stand. If you are going to mounting it up against something
On the top of the adapter it's got a standard Canon plug and that standard canon plug
can be plugged directly into a microphone or it can be connected with a short lead.
you got an indicator on here to show phantom power is switched on.
A little mic gain control and that's quite a handy
little control because it can vary the gain on the preamp
And that gives you the opportunity to match the input nicely
You've got a play back and mic monitoring so if
you turn it to the right hand side you'll monitor
the microphone more than your hearing the playback.
If you turn it to the left you will hear more from the computer.
And the bottom controller is an overall volume control for your head phone output
So on the bottom you have got a headphone output and a USB connection
Over on the back you've got a nice soft pad and you might have seen when I started
pulling this out of the box it had velcro tabs though here,
that allows you to connect that to a microphone stand.
So it is quite a handy little unit.
It's feels quite light but strong, going over all
the parts nothing feels loose it's quite strong.
And the controls are sturdy- it's fine! Well let's have a listen to it.
What I have done is I have set up a very basic laptop
it's not very powerful. so it's really going to test
to see whether this unit is very versatile
And I got a standard microphone is just a cardioid
microphone. A beyer-dynamic TGV 50 D-
just a very basic microphone so we won't be using phantom power for this test
And I have got audacity set up on the laptop and
we will see how it goes.
What I will do is I will set up the USB lead plugging it in the PC,
and they say in the instructions that it's a
plug and play unit let's see if that is the case
So the little blue indicator shows that there is power
before I do anything else I will see if this phantom power
is switchable. The phantom power light comes up with a green light
I can see on the computer that says "installing device driver software"
It says "your device is ready for use" lets see if it appears
and yes there is three devices there now.
the USB audio device microphone so I have selected that
Now I'm going to make sure the phantom power is switched off.
Because this microphone doesn't need phantom power.
I will plug it in. Turn the mic gain right up.
Test 1234 testing 1234- Start monitoring yes there we are. I've adjusted the mic gain
so that the levels on the meter are going up to about
-6
and it looks like there's plenty of mic gain left there so that's good to see.
I'll just read a little bit from the back of the packaging.
"The X USB features a 16 bit A/D converter with a 48 kHz sampling rate,
Being plug and play it's one of the easiest way is to connect any
microphone to computer or USB for recording and playback."
We certainly proved that! It was dead easy.
okay so I'll stop speaking you can have a listen for any self-noise
Let's have a look at does something to compare with the ART USB Dual pre
"The USB dual pre is a full featured high-quality dual portable preamplifier and computer interface
packed into a compact rugged package"
Now stop speaking see can listen to self-noise
Now to test the phantom power out I'm just going to connect
the beyer-dynamic TGV 56C microphone which is a condenser mike
"The X USB features a 16 bit A/D converter with a 48 kHz sampling rate,
Being plug and play it's one of the easiest way is to connect any
microphone to computer or USB for recording and playback."
With this microphone plugged in it does seem to have a
little bit less noise on the meters.
We will have a listen to that for ourselves on playback
The Swamp X-USB I think it's really good value for money
for what you get a mic gain, you get a monitor control
which actually varies between playback and also your
microphone monitoring and then overall volume control
you get all those features plus phantom power directly
from the 5 volt power supply,
you don't have to add any extra power to it
It does it quite adequately it's Mac friendly as well
compare that to say the ART USB Dual pre which is about $100 dearer
Mind you, you do get the advantage of having a better
signal to noise ratio with this type of unit
but for $70 it's good value really
I'll leave some links in the description below so
you can check out this item for yourself and if
you've got any questions, make sure you put those
in the comments section. you might even have some
great alternatives yourself- then let us know so that we can share that with others as well
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thanks for watching, I'll catch you later.