USB Mike Lets You Talk Freely to PCs, Notebooks

When I speak to my PC using a typical headset microphone, I sometimes feel like an automaton. The gizmo is clamped onto my head, it's wired to my system's sound card, and, of course, if I turn my face the headset follows.

There is a way to escape that tethered feeling. Andrea Electronics offers a family of far-field digital microphones that sit on your desk or monitor but are designed to be just as effective as headsets. Andrea's new $130 USB Microphone Array is a stand-alone device that you can affix to either the top of your monitor or the desk space in front of your computer. You don't wear it--you talk into it from a distance of up to 2 feet. Unlike its sibling, the DA-400 2.0 Desktop Array, the USB Microphone Array plugs into a Universal Serial Bus port.

The freestanding USB Microphone Array's small, horizontal, stick-like body contains four embedded microphone chips, and measures approximately 8 inches wide by 1 inch deep. The unit's base tilts 180 degrees, offering you plenty of options for positioning. Andrea also provides Velcro adhesive strips for attaching the unit to your notebook system's case.

USB: The Big Bonus

The most unusual thing about the Microphone Array is its USB capability. The microphone comes with its own sound kit--a lightweight, compact box about the size of a power adapter--which connects to the USB cable. Instead of plugging the Array into the sound card jack, you plug it into a USB port. As a result, the microphone completely bypasses your machine's sound card.

That setup is terrific news for notebook users. Notebook manufacturers are often forced to cram sound circuitry into a relatively small space, so when a regular microphone is hooked up to a notebook's sound-input jack, the microphone can pick up extraneous sounds (like the whirring of a fan) that interfere with voice-driven activities. Such extraneous noise distorts the voice input and can result in weaker performance. In bypassing the notebook's sound circuitry and using its own external box, the USB Microphone Array delivers a high-quality audio signal directly to the notebook's motherboard through the USB socket.

Before you can get up and running, you need to install Andrea's USB drivers--they ship with the product on CD-ROM--and change the default recording device to Andrea's USB Microphone Array (select Start, Control Panel, Multimedia, click on the Audio tab, and access the drop-down menu under Recording/Preferred Device). The microphone will work with any speech-driven application, including voice recognition software, Internet phones, and videoconferencing software. However, the microphone is compatible with Windows 98 Second Edition and Windows 2000 only.

I installed the drivers on two Windows 98 SE notebooks: a Pentium II-233 and a Pentium III-600. Installation was painless and took less than 5 minutes on the PIII, but I had trouble with the drivers on the PII. I needed to insert the Windows 98 SE disc and manually ferret out the files that the microphone required. For 20 minutes, I was continually swapping the Andrea CD-ROM with the Windows 98 SE CD-ROM, rebooting and starting over, to get the drivers installed successfully.