We’re big fans of Blast Radio’s Blast Box, which makes it easy to broadcast lossless-quality live performances and podcasts without the need for a PC, phone, or tablet. Seriously, as long as you have an available internet connection, the Blast Box is all you need. Their newest product, the Blast Radio Blast Mic, embraces the same principles, but makes things even simpler.
Designed for podcasters and talking heads, it’s a microphone that has all the necessary hardware to broadcast straight to the Blast Radio servers, allowing you to produce an audio livestream in a jiffy. Want to rant about your favorite NBA team as you’re exiting the stadium after a win? Pull out the mic and do just that. Want to livestream audio of random interviews with people at a trade show, local festival, or political gathering? This thing is all you need to get that done.
The Blast Radio Blast Mic is a literal microphone, albeit with a chunkier body that what you’ll normally find. That’s because it houses all the necessary electronics to broadcast an audio livestream over Wi-Fi, allowing you to go online with just a single piece of hardware. No need for an audio mixer, a PC, or even a phone – just the press the button, start talking into the mic, and you’re live for the world to hear.
It’s equipped with two electret microphones in an XY configuration, so it can capture proper stereo audio, with adjustable gain, so you can dial in just how loud you want your audio to be. Upon capturing the audio, the device uses onboard signal processing to maximize the sound quality, then streams it as lossless uncompressed PCM audio packets to the Blast Radio servers. As you can imagine, this requires a consistent and reliable Wi-Fi connection, so make sure you have one available wherever you decide to run your broadcast.
The Blast Radio Blast Mic also comes two 3.5mm mic inputs with three-volt phantom power, allowing you to use it not just as a microphone, but as an audio mixer of sorts, in case you need to do a multi-microphone interview or podcast. There’s also with a 3.5mm stereo line-in, in case you want to plug in another audio source (e.g. background music player). So you can monitor what you’re actually broadcasting, there are also two headphone output ports with separate volume controls and AB class headphone amp. Suffice to say, this is not just a microphone, but an all-in-one broadcasting rig. It comes with a LED matrix display and a status indicator, for visually monitoring what’s going on with the hardware.
An onboard battery allows you to broadcast for an estimated eight hours between charges, so you can go quite a bit in the field before needing to plug in to a power source. According to the outfit, all livestreams are saved to the app’s servers in WAV format, which you might want to download within 24 hours, as the service deletes all audio livestreams after that period (you know… like one of those messaging where messages disappear).
The Blast Radio Blast Mic is available now, priced at $299.
