A few months ago I looked into purchasing a DAC so that I could make use of my microphone under Ubuntu since my current box was unable to function (Creative Drivers under linux seem to vary depending on what you want to do), but I ended up giving up on that search since all of the alternatives seemed out of price range for something that I was merely doing testing under.
After reading the article I posted the other night I decided to revive that search. When DAC’s seemed out of reach to me I ended up looking for a Shure X2U, after all I have a Shure SM58 and why not get something to match it? I read enough to understand that it worked fine under linux. The downside was the $99 price range, and while on sale they were $78 which I still considered to be too much for what little I was doing at the time. So while searching amazon last night I accidentally tripped across this little pre amp.
I did some digging around and found people have gotten it to work with their Shure microphones, and even better they got it to work under Linux! So after a couple margaritas and a couple hours of research I decided that $69 was the perfect price for this unit (giggity). The only downside I really found was having to turn up the audio pretty high so you could be heard through your headphones. But I can boost that with the equipment that I already have on hand, and if need be small amplifiers and EQ units are cheap.
Another nice thing about getting this pre amp is that I’ll be able to take it with my laptop should I ever require a portable studio (personal voice acting on the run among other things), or just recording random chat in good quality.
I bought a couple XLR cables tonight, as soon as stuff gets here there will be more testing in my future. Then I’ll post the results.