mxl desktop mic straight to ibook?

[oh_the_blood]

im thinking of buying the MXL desktop recording kit that comes with a battery powered mic and xlr - 1/8" cable.

i was just curious could i get buy with plugging this straight into my ibooks input and useing garageband?
or would it sound like pure crap?

Suggestions please! thanks.

 

[shiatzu]

probably not 'pure' crap, but it'd definitely be crap to some degree.

 

[dgatwood]

im thinking of buying the MXL desktop recording kit that comes with a battery powered mic and xlr - 1/8" cable.

i was just curious could i get buy with plugging this straight into my ibooks input and useing garageband?
or would it sound like pure crap?

Suggestions please! thanks.

I would expect it to be fairly decent, actually. You'd probably get a better signal with an outboard interface, but I did an awful lot of recording with a PowerBook's audio inputs back a few years ago (before I moved to California). I've compared it side-by-side with my more recent stuff (Delta 1010LT), and it isn't half bad. A little higher noise floor (though I'd imagine a lot of that was the cassette deck I used for pres), but I'd put it up against SoundBlaster stuff any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

I know some of the folks that do the audio hardware on various Macs. They're pretty religious about tweaking things to get the best possible sound out of the hardware, tweaking cable routing, changing signal routing on the boards, etc. I wouldn't expect miracles or anything, but I definitely wouldn't expect mud.

 

[oh_the_blood]

how could i make the quality better?

 

[tourettes5139]

Buy an interface. I'm not sure that there is much more that you could do to help the quality from built-in sound cards. But judging from dgatwood's comments, it seems to be better than I had anticipated.