Product Reviews

Choosing the right hardware for PC music production can be daunting, but Samson's G-Track aims to make it easy. It's a large-diaphragm condenser microphone that avoids the need for a specialist preamp and sound card, plugging directly into your PC via USB. It even includes a line input, which can also accommodate electric guitars, plus all the cables you're likely to need and a smart desktop stand. And it comes with a copy of Sonar LE, highly capable (if a little intimidating) 64-track recording software.

Best of all, it has a headphone output. When you're recording musical performances, it's essential

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to hear yourself plus any music you're singing or playing along to. With other USB microphones, there's no way to do this except by passing the microphone signal through your recording software, which adds a distracting delay. The G-Track avoids this by sending the signal directly to the headphones, mixed together with the PC's audio output. The only letdown is that there's a switch for sending the microphone to the headphones, rather than a variable control to balance the computer and microphone levels. It's possible to get around this using the other knobs and Windows' mixer utility, but it's cumbersome.

The sound quality of the microphone is excellent, with an airy top end and lots of presence. There's a bit of background hiss when the volume is turned right up to record quiet sources such as speech, but it's not a serious concern. However, audio was recorded 11 milliseconds late in Sonar LE software, a problem that might well go unnoticed but is still undesirable. When we used Mackie Tracktion software it was able to counteract the problem, but the equivalent feature in Sonar didn't seem to work.

Despite this hiccup, the G-Track is a great idea, and it works extremely well.