Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin reporting live from CES 2012 with some of the new blue microphone products so Jonathan you might go ahead take it away absolutely so this year we're showing off three new products all of which are kind of taking a step in a different direction from what we normally done what we're doing now is we're integrating a lot of digital signal processing into our consumer products for instance we have our new USB mic called the Tiki so the Tiki is designed for communication is the first mark that we're kind of designing from something other than home recording there's over a billion skype user accounts and hundreds of millions of other i chat and gotomeeting accounts and we wanted to kind of fill that need of missing quality audio for that type of situation now one of the biggest problems when you're on a Skype conference call somebody starts typing and that basically eliminates the possibility of anybody else on that call hearing what's going on plus there's dogs barking toilets flushing babies crying in the background we wanted to be able to just be able to focus on the talkers voice and not anything else so inside of here there's a very very powerful DSP chip in here it's going to let it act like an intelligent sensor so as you're moving around the microphone it's actually going to follow your voice and eliminate all the noise coming from the sides in the back so there's two capsules in here one going that way one going that way but it doesn't mean it's an omnidirectional or figure eight Mike the polar pattern is actually adaptable so it's a very impressive Mike what it's doing is incredible and this mike is only going to be $59 retail and it's going to be out and about mid-april so the second cool product that we have is our new spark digital so anybody that's been following blue for the last couple of years has probably seen us come out with spark it's one of our best-selling studio microphones spark has this little button on the back called the focus control when you push this in it's actually going to increase the voltage to the capsule gives you more in your face focus sound when you release it you get a flatter smoother zone so what we did is we took all the analog components that we love about this mic and put them into here into this chassis and this is a basically a digital version of the spark microphone now instead of being XLR out the bottom of this guy has a mini HDMI and it's going to come with two cables one of which is going to be able to plug into your iOS devices like your iPad the other cable will allow you to plug in USB into your computer so unlike most USB mics that are going to use like smaller condenser capsules and draw a little bit less power those mics are designed specifically for you know USB production this mic right here is was originally designed as a studio mic in by the physics of the size and the shape of the capsule just going to give you a little bit warmer richer sound than you get out of a typical USB mic so last but not least we have our Mikey digital up Spencer so if you know blue for the past three years we've been showing off versions one in version 2 of the Mikey which is stereo mic that goes in your iPod or iPhone turns an interval field recorder when Apple came out with iphone 4 they changed the connector the 30 pin connector to only accept digital audio so kind of went to back to the drawing board rework town we're doing the electronics inside of this microphone so Mikey digital is going to be able to be compatible with your iPad your iPhone 4 and above and your later versions your ipod touches one thing that we had upgraded on this also is on the previous version of the Mikey there was a stereo line input now this stereo line input will also be able to switch impedance to be able to take in the jack from a guitar so you can plug a guitar directly into here and it's going to sound amazing so which is great because now the iPads have garageband and all these crazy new guitar effects apps so I've even heard of people showing up at their shows and just plugging a guitar directly into their iPhone and using a distortion or guitar amplifying simulator so there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with just that but on top of that you're still getting your award-winning sound out of your microphones inside of here another change we did still has this little switch on the back that you'll see on Mikey version 1 and 2 for your games but here we have a high gain a low gain but the middle setting is auto gain so we're using a very strong DSP chip in hearing to allow you to do that auto gain is actually going to be taking about a hundred times more samples a second than what's out on the market right now for auto gain so it's a very intelligent auto gain system so that way you can just set the gain and forget it so if something gets really loud or look really quiet it's not going to take a few seconds for the microphone to get back to a normal listening level so this is a really cool Mike it's going to be out in mid April is going to be ninety nine dollars retail the spark digital be 199 retail about the same time if you want any more information on these mics you can go to blue Mike com that's BL you e mi si.com and check out some more stuff