Blue Microphones Mikey for iPod

First impressions don’t always prove to be indicative in the long term. But sometimes they turn out to be dead on, and that’s the case with the Mikey, the snap-on audio recording tool for iPod (and unofficially, iPhone) from Blue Microphones, the company whose previous consumer offerings such for use with a computer, including the Snowball and Snowflake have been widely well-received. So we were intrigued when Blue demoed the Mikey for us back at Macworld Expo in January. Far from the first snap-on iPod recorder to come to market (I’ve been using existing offerings from Belkin and Griffin to record in-person musician interviews for iProng Magazine for years), what makes the Mikey stand out is that while it’s a little larger and a little more expensive than existing offerings, the resulting audio quality is head and shoulders above the competition.



And while the rapid pace and hundreds of new products on display at the Expo means that we only get to spend a brief amount of hands-on time with each demo unit, the little bit of recording and playback we conducted in the Expo hall made it immediately clear that the company’s claims about audio quality were indeed true. And it only makes sense, as the Mikey is the first iPod audio recorder to be offered by a microphone-specific company.

But there’s a reason why we wait to hand out our official star ratings for products until the product goes into mass production and we can get our hands on a final shipping unit. Changes (not always for the better) can be made to preproduction units before they go into mass production, and even without any such changes, first impressions can occasionally turn out to be flat-out wrong.

However, now that the Mikey is finally shipping and I’ve been able to spend some quality time with it here in my office, I can confidently say that I’m even more impressed with the product now than I was back in January. My tests included recording my own voice from a few feet away and from across the room, with and without staged background noise, and the Mikey did a great job of both recording my voice at high quality and filtering out the background noise; and while existing iPod recorders have always done a decent job of the former, the latter has always been their achilles heel.



A big part of what allows the Mikey to rise above it its built-in swivel (five positions through 180 degrees) allows you to point the Mikey’s front face at whatever angle you want; with other recorders you’re more or less limited to either trying to hold the entire iPod/recorder contraption in your hand at the angle you’re hoping for, or trying to prop the whole thing up at an angle on a flat surface. But the Mikey can be positioned however you want (see above diagram), and in my tests I found that it does indeed allow you to focus on the audio source you want. Another key to audio quality is the three-setting gain switch which allows high-quality recording of audio sources that are up close, at a moderate distance, or far away from you.



But perhaps where the Mikey really shines above existing recorders is when you use it to record not just spoken voice but actualy music. While I was unable to test the Mikey in an actual concert setting, I simulated one by firing up a live album on my computer speakers and then simulated crowd chatter by playing a TV news channel in the background, and the results with the Mikey were noticeably superior to the recordings I got by using the aforementioned (admittedly smaller and less expensive) recorders from Griffin and Belkin.



The big surprise, though, came in the form of battery usage. Since devices like the Mikey tap into the iPod’s battery instead of having a power source of their own, using them causes your iPod’s battery life to be (sometimes significantly) shorter than normal. And generally speaking, the larger and more sophisticated the attachment, the faster you can expect your iPod’s battery life to disappear. Accordingly, heading into hands-on testing I was expecting the Mikey to eat through my iPod nano’s battery even faster than smaller competing products – which in my experience can sometimes burn through an iPod’s battery at an almost alarming rate. But because the Mikey doesn’t use auto-gain, it uses power than recorders that do, and as such I was able to get a few hours of recording time with the Mikey on my nano whereas I’m sometimes barely able to get an hour with some of the competing recorders.



Here in 2009 the iPod recorder market, which had long consisted strictly of medium-sized, medium-priced, medium-quality products that were largely similar to each other, is now branching out in both directions. On the one end we’ve got tiny budget-priced recorders from companies like Incipio that cost $18 and stand a mere half-inch tall, and on the other end we have the $79 Mikey at the high end of the spectrum. So the question is not whether the Mikey is worthy, as it’s essentially a perfect product for those who are going to take advantage of its quality and features, but more of a question of just who those users are. If you’re only going to record your own voice from a few feet away with little to no background noise, an you only care about audio quality in so much as being able to understand yourself during playback, then you can probably get away with one of those tiny sub-$20 recorders. But if you care about audio quality (particularly if you plan to let others hear the recording, such as on a podcast), and you’re okay with your recorder protruding nearly two inches out the bottom of your iPod, then the Mikey is easily worth the $79 investment.



A few notes: while the Mikey is only listed as being officially compatible with traditional iPods such as the nano, classic, video, etc., it is in fact compatible with the iPhone. When you connect the Mikey to the iPhone you’ll be greeted with the now-familiar incompatibility warning. But once you dismiss it, you can then use the Mikey via any of a number of free or paid recording apps from the App Store. In my tests I found that doing so resulted in the same audio quality as when I used the Mikey with an iPod nano. A representative from Blue told me that the next generation of the Mikey will include the authentication chip that prevents the warning dialogue from appearing at all, but even in the current generation it’s a needless warning on Apple’s part. The Blue rep also confirmed that there’s currently no way to use the Mikey with the iPod touch without hacking the software, something we don’t recommend under any circumstances.