Home > Consumer Reviews > Logitech USB Desktop Microphone

I wasn't sure whether to get this or a uni-directional hand-held mic to record voices. I had plugged good mics into my soundcard before but never got the right quality. On the other hand I have a noisy harddrive so didn't think a USB connected mic would be good enough.
Eventually I went for this mainly because of the good reviews and price although I was concerned whether it could really be THAT good.
First thing : The recording quality *is* good. I know the other reviews mention this but it's still a nice surprise how good it really is.
Second, the mic is sitting on my desk just above the noisy Hard-drive (OK there's a wooden desk in-between) but I have yet to hear *any* background noise.
Third, it plugs straight in and works (win/xp).
Fourth, it has a long enough USB cable for me to use it in another room if I want.
It does feel a little bit flimsy but I don't care about that so 5-stars.

Used a couple of other mics with Skype but they were not that good. paid a little but not that much more for this & it is just superb.
Installed (into Windows XP) with no prompting whatsoever & worked straight away.
Very clear, & picks up your voice no matter where you sit, even if not at the desk.
Couldn't ask for more, well worth the extra few pounds

This microphone is well designed, and has been put together properly. Installation has always been easy, as windows will automatically detect it, and load appropriate drivers. There have been reports of problems with XP, though I have never had this issue.

In use, this microphone is very easy to use, as you can situate it on the desktop or on top of a CRT type monitor and after initial sound setup, it works without any problems. Sound quality is ideal for use with voip or teamspeak, but lacks enough clarity for podcasting. The microphone is more than sensitive enough to pick up both foreground and background sound if not correctly setup.

The on/off switch is a nice feature for gamers, as it allows you to switch the microphone off without leaving the game.

I've recommended this microphone to others, and will continue to do so.

I am very impressed by the build quality of this microphone, I have got multiple sclerosis and have wobbly hands and need to use voice recognition because I do not have the dexterity to utilise either my mouse or my keyboard.

This piece of kit is an absolute necessity in my case because of my boisterous heavy-handed activities the products that I use have to be solid and this certainly is!

... and believe I've found it!

In my experience, the problems with standard microphones are two in this application where you have one or more nodes in the conference using speakers and microphone:
1) too low far-field sensitivity, and/or too pronounced interference with room acoustics. This means you have to be very close to the microphone for it to pick up the conversation clearly.
2) problems with echo/feedback from the other party speaking, this normally activates crude muting schemes in common simple videoconference applications like Skype in order to break the feedback loop. This makes it very difficult to maintain a natural conversation where you must be able to react on interjections and so forth.

I've made some preliminary tests of this microphone and found it to work much over expectation to address both of these problems. Far-field characteristics is very good in that room echo seems suppressed while maintaining high sensitivity also at quite large distance, and the conversation dynamics also works very well in that the muting effect is much less pronounced than with standard microphones. You get a true "full duplex" feeling, providing for very natural multi-party conversation.

Also, the sound quality is very good.

Add to this the true "plug and play", no drivers or anything.

Summary: this is an incredible conference microphone for the price.