Every day I bring you an item on Amazon that I personally use or has been purchased by many members of the audience and I have researched enough to recommend.

Today’s TSP Amazon Item of the day is the Samson C01U Podcasting Pack.  Okay cutting the fancy sounding title it is a Samson C01U Microphone with cables and a desk top microphone stand.  If you just want the CO1U mic you can save some money and get it stand alone, but you will need a way to mount it and unless you already have stand gear, you will end up spending more money.

This is the mic I have used for 7 years now on TSP.  It is simple to set up, I don’t use a mixing board, it just plugs into the PC via a USB port, and it flatly like everything I settle on, just works, it always just works.

I recommend this mic as a starting point for anyone that wants to start a podcast or just make quality voice recordings.  It is also good for those of you who are frequent guests on podcasts or call in to radio shows and what have you via skype.  Or those that participate in online webinars as either a student or an instructor.

Are there better mics?  Yea sure, but you have to ask if they are worth the money or if you really need an expensive mixing board to do a one man podcast with say some skype interviews?  Is your voice so amazing as to rate encoding at 128 mbps so anyone can even here the difference, and hate downloading your audio files too by the way.  FWIW TSP is encoded at 32kbps which is FM quality audio.

The other type of person this mic is for is the person that does say screen capture Youtube videos and the like.  People will deal with a bit of out of focus video a lot more than they will with bad quality sound.  Anyway I mainly did this because I get questions about my set up for the show all the time, so in the future I will cover the other things I use.

Included with this “Podcast Pack” is a copy of Audacity software, look don’t be impressed it is free to download online and you can get it for PC or for a Mac.  The case is very nice though.  I like this set up enough that I have sponsored three different people into podcasting and gifted them this set up to get them started.  And that is a lesson as well.

I didn’t buy my first CO1U, a listener that wanted to help make the show better had one he wasn’t using and sent it to me as a gift.  So over the years when I have worked with a person who I believed in to get going I have given away three of them myself.  I think that really is how the best things come to be.

In any event that gift was over 7 years ago, and that same mic is sitting in front of me right now, ready to roll again with episode 1854.  So I recommend it on longevity alone.  If you need a good mic and don’t want to mortgage your house to pay for it, check out the Samson C01U Podcasting Pack it won’t let you down.

Remember you can always find all of our reviews at TspAz.com