Alternate Solution for Costly USB Microphone

6 Feb 2014

Since our raspberry is not having microphone input port,we need to use USB interface for taking audio input. There are some USB microphones available in market but I found that these microphones are very expensive. But there is a good alternative solution to this problem.

USB SOUND CARD:

USB sound "cards", sometimes called "audio interfaces", are usually external boxes that plug into the computer via USB. A USB audio interface may describe a device allowing a computer which has a sound-card, yet lacks a standard audio socket, to be connected to an external device which requires such a socket, via its USB socket.

The USB specification defines a standard interface, the USB audio device class, allowing a single driver to work with the various USB sound devices and interfaces on the market.

Even cards meeting the older, slow, USB 1.1 specification are capable of high quality sound with a limited number of channels, or limited sampling frequency or bit depth, but USB 2.0 or later is more capable.(Source Wikipedia)

I found this device on shopclues which is costing around Rs.169 , It is very good solution to our problem.

There are some other variants of this converters available online