Kayray has been writing recently about librivox, a project to make public domain audio recordings of public domain material (much of it present in Project Gutenberg).

I’m interested in volunteering to read some material. But I don’t have any nice microphone. After doing some research, it looks like I’m down to a couple of different options.

The first option is described by The Roadhouse. It has a $60 MXL 990 mic and a Behringer Eurorack UB802 mixer at $50. I assume that he is running an output from that into a standard sound card. So the total cost of that setup would run around $110. I don’t really need to mix more than one source, but having something that can power condensor mics with XLR connectors looks good.

The second option is to get a dedicated USB mic. The mic of choice here seems to be the Blue Snowball at about $140.

I don’t know enough about this to know which setup would get me the best quality for voice recording that is going to be going to wind up digital on the PC in the end.

I guess the third option is something such as the m-audio mobilepre USB preamp at about $120. So if I used that with the MXL 990, I’d be talking about $180. That’s rather more than I’d like to spend, but it would give me more options down the road.

If any of you have suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.