On the body, there are HPF and pad switches and a twin aluminium knobs, one for gain and the other for headphone volume. Attachment to the supplied shock mount is by a chunky thread surrounding the USB B socket and an identical blue LED shows the mic is powered up. After the conservative looks of the SL150 the SL600 is definitely a show off with a matte black cylindrical body and a bright orange grille! However gaudy that sounds, in the flesh it looks like a perfectly sensible piece of hardware. The SL600 is the most fully featured and most expensive in the Editors Keys range, though all of these mics are definitely at the affordable end of the market and currently retails at £189.99. Although it will happily record into a 24bit session, the 8 least significant bits remain unused restricting the available dynamic range.
The A/D converter is a 44.1/48 KHz affair but is 16 bit only. The USB lead supplies power to the capsule and being a USB mic supplies bus power to the built-in A/D converter. The 34mm gold diaphragm capsule is clearly visible behind the dual layer wire mesh and rather than having a power LED on the body, the capsule is up-lit by a blue LED so bright that it throws a small blue beam up to the ceiling. It has no controls on the body, just a USB B Type socket (the one you find on a printer) where the XLR would usually be. Construction-wise the die-cast, nickel finish body of the mic has a conical taper to it and with its cylindrical head if you took a U87 body and attached a U47's head you would have something cosmetically similar to this (though, with all due respect to the SL150 this is where the similarity to either of these mics ends.).
It is a fixed cardioid, large diaphragm USB condenser mic. The SL150 is the simplest and most affordable of the USB mics in this range and currently retails at £99.99.
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