any good sites for stereo mics? ----- Original Message ----- From: Chris Blouch To: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com Sent: Monday, August 31, 2009 1:38 PM Subject: Re: mac mini mic jack
Your guess is correct. The Macs have a line-in without a mic preamp. As posted by this person some time ago: http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/215780-post5.html most of the PC sound cards have a mic input with a preamp but the sound quality is poor. I guess Apple figured that anybody who wanted to do stuff with external mics would want to have good sound quality and would pick a preamp that they like. Condenser mics also need 48 v power (sometimes called phantom power) so just doing a line input removed a who lot of complexity that many users just wouldn't care about. That also means a bunch of junky PC mics just won't work with the Mac without some external gear. Most $30 and up preamps will sound pretty decent and have lots of nice features. Here's one example just googling around: http://www.zzounds.com/item--BEHMIC100 CB Dane Trethowan wrote: Hi! Okay, just because the microphone worked with the Windows PC doesn't mean its going to work with the Mac I'm afraid and if my hunch is correct - that you're using a microphone which plugs into the microphone jack of a PC and you're expecting it to work plugged into the Line in jack of your Mac - then you're going to be a little disappointed I think <smile>. I can't answer your garage Band question I'm afraid so let's deal with Skype then. The first thing you need to do is set the audio preferences in Skype, these are independent o the System Preferences for the Mac and are found by pressing command-, in Skype, go to the Toolbar, interact with it and press vo-space on the "Audio" button. From here you select your input and output, make sure the input reflects the microphone or whatever you're using. I bypassed a lot of this trouble by using a simple USB microphone, Logitech sell one for about $40.00 which does an excellent job, its the same as the one I use. You may also like to consider a USB headset though be a little careful here, some microphones on some sound as though you have your finger stuck up your nose <smile>. One final thing, to determine what you sound like on Skype, make a call to "Skype Test Call" which should be in your contacts table somewhere, if you can't find it then go into the "View" menu and select "Show offline contacts" On 22/08/2009, at 12:46 PM, John G. Heim wrote: I am trying to use skype on my mac mini. But the microphone doesn't work. I know the microphone I am using works because I just made a skype call with it on my Windows machine on Monday. I also tried connecting a stereo imput line to the jack and recording something with Garage Band and that didn't work either. I went into system preferences and found the imput tab. I turned the lin-in volume up to 100%. Still no luck. Any ideas? ****************************** Dane Trethowan From Melton Victoria Australia mailto:"grtd...@internode.on.net Twitter: http://twitter.com/grtdane blog: http://www.grtdane.wordpress.com Phone United Kingdom 02032874641 Phone Australia 0390058589 Phone United States 8159261869 Fax: +61 3 9743 7954x MSN grtd...@dane-trethowan.net skype:grtdane12 ****************************** --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
