Blue Microphones

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Blue Microphones designs and produces microphones, recording tools, signal processors, and music accessories for audio professionals, musicians and consumers.

Blue Microphones
Type Private
Founded 1995
Headquarters Westlake Village, California, U.S.A.
Products Consumer and professional microphones and recording tools
Website http://www.bluemic.com
A Yeti USB microphone

History

Blue Microphones[1] was founded in 1995 by an American session musician, Skipper Wise, and a Latvian recording engineer, Martins Saulespurens. The company's name is an acronym for Baltic Latvian Universal Electronics. The company is headquartered in Westlake, California, USA. Along with studio microphones, Blue has a line of consumer USB microphones, such as the Yeti, the first THX certified microphone,[2] Snowball, the Snowflake, the Tiki and Mikey, the first High Definition microphone designed for use with Apple Inc.'s iPod.

In 2008, Skipper and Martins sold Blue Microphones to Transom Capital, a private Equity firm from Southern California.[3]

In 2013, The Riverside Company acquired Blue Microphones from Transom Capital. Intrepid Investment Bankers advised Blue Microphones in the transaction.[4]

Microphones

Blue Microphones designs and manufactures condenser microphones, ribbon microphones, dynamic microphones and USB microphones.

Studio

Blue Microphones designs and creates a line of studio recording microphones that are separated into two series: the Bottle series and the Application series.

The Bottle series, consisting of the Bottle, the Bottle Rocket Stage One and Bottle Rocket Stage Two, integrates Blue’s discrete class A circuitry and interchangeable capsules, Blue’s Bottle Caps.

The Application Specific Series contains its own proprietary capsule to capture specific sonic signatures. For example, the Mouse microphone is a low-frequency focused microphone that is designed to capture the lows of kick drums, bass amps and deep vocals. The Dragonfly is designed specifically to capture and thicken thin sounds from soprano vocals and instruments like drum overheads.

USB

Blue Microphones designs and creates professional-quality USB microphones, including the multi-pattern USB mic, the Yeti and Yeti Pro, the world’s first USB and XLR microphone combining 24 bit/192 kHz digital recording resolution—the highest digital resolution on the market—with analog XLR output.

In January 2012 Blue announced their new Spark Digital microphone. The Spark Digital is an expansion of the Spark XLR studio microphone. However, unlike the latter, the Spark Digital offers a USB interface and could also connect directly to an Apple iPad via Apple’s 30-pin connector. The Spark Digital was the first studio-grade condenser microphone to be able to directly connect to the iPad in this way.[5]

Awards

  • Electronic Musician 2000 Editor’s Choice Microphone of the Year - Blueberry condenser microphone
  • RetailVision 2009 Best Hardware peripheral - Mikey and Eyeball 2.0[6]
  • BeatWeek (formerly iProng) Best in Show 2009, 2010[7]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Nathan Olivarez-Giles (2009-07-21). "Blue Microphones turns up the volume". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2011-05-06. 
  2. ↑ "Blue Microphones Yeti USB Mic". Reviews.CNET.com. 2009-12-16. Retrieved 2010-04-30. 
  3. ↑ Music Inc Magazine (2009-10-20). "Transom Capital Acquires Blue Microphones". Music Inc Magazine. Retrieved 2011-05-11. 
  4. ↑ http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/transom-capital-group-completes-sale-of-blue-microphones-216603951.html
  5. ↑ Lester, Ahren. "NAMM 2012: Blue Microphones unveils new Spark Digital mic". Audio Pro International. Retrieved 31 January 2012. 
  6. ↑ "RetailVision Europe 2009". RetailVision. 2009-05-26. Retrieved 2010-04-30. 
  7. ↑ "Best of Show CES: Blue Mikey 2". BeatWeek. 2009-01-09. Retrieved 2010-07-07. 
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