My wife is a budding poet and novelist, and the local writer's group she's involved in has decided they'd like to publish some of her work on their website. In additional to posting her prose as HTML, they wanted to load up the server with some recordings of her reading her material, particularly once they found out that her husband was an off-hours recording hobbyist. We finally got around to tackling the task late last night and, in pursuit of a quick-and-easy approach, I parked her in front of my PowerBook, with her text, loaded up in Word for OS X, displayed on the LCD and Amadeus II recording from the computer's built-in mono mic (located under the left speaker grill).

After I sequestering the dogs and cats, turned off the swamp cooler and shut down or removed all other obvious sources of ambient noise in and nearby her office, she set to work. However, when we played back the first recording, we still heard a constant whine in the background, along with occasional clicks. In retrospect, their source was obvious; the whine was the CPU fan, and sporadic HDD accesses caused the clicks. Neither was particularly noticeable to us, located a few feet away from the PowerBook, but for the close-proximity microphone, it was a different story.

Fortunately, Griffin Technology had just sent me an iMic USB audio peripheral (which also works under Windows, by the way, and is quite inexpensive), and I also had one of the company's two-channel lapel mics close at hand. The two items worked very well together; I didn't have to install any drivers prior to plugging in the iMic, which Amadeus II immediately recognized as an audio input device option. And the resultant recording, with the microphone far away from the noisy CPU fan and HDD, and with the A/D circuitry also 'outside the box', was much cleaner than our first attempt.

The situation we encountered last night reminded me of Akustica's MEMS microphones, which I saw and heard first-hand at the spring Intel Developer Forum and which my cohort Graham Prophet recently did a nice writeup on. Because the AKU2000 has a digital output, you aren't forced to place it in close proximity to an ADC on the motherboard. You could, for example, run a dedicated digital audio wire from the motherboard, up through the display hinge, and to a mic located at the top edge of the bezel. Or, if a USB webcam is also located in the display, its USB connection could do double-duty, carrying both audio and images in a multiplexed fashion.