Music Thing: NAMM show highlights

Each week, Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment:

This weekend is the vast NAMM show in Anaheim, the music gear equivalent of CES. These are three of the highlights so far:

1) Snowball USB
Microphone: $139

Blue are a very high-end Californian microphone maker, selling $1,000 pre-amps and $5,000 microphones. But their new thing is a $139 microphone which outputs sound directly through USB, with no extra interface. There are two capsules built into the white sphere. One is for vocals, one for instruments. It will look beautiful sitting next to your Mac Mini.

2) Korg Oasys Keyboard:
$8,499

At the other end of the scale in price and aesthetic appeal is Korg's gargantuan Oasys synth. It's a keyboard with a built in computer running Linux on a 10.4 inch colour touch screen. The specifications and acronyms in this box go on for pages. It feels like an 80s mega-synth, but the worry for Korg is that in 2005 you can do everything this can do with a PC costing a quarter of the price.

3) Focusrite Saffire: $TBC

Apple's rumoured audio interface hasn't materialised at NAMM, so if you're looking for a high-quality firewire sound card made of shiny white plastic, you'll need a Focusrite Saffire. Focusrite are a very cool British audio company, founded by legendary sound boffin Rupert Neve (Dr Dre records every vocal through a vintage Neve pre-amp). The Saffire has pretty standard spec -
two inputs, eight outputs and built-in hardware effects, but it's sure to sound great.