Samson Q7 With DNS - A KnowBrainer Review

Although we can appreciate emicrophones 12 years of experience, it doesn't necessarily equate to necessarily knowing how to properly test microphones. We have been testing microphones since 1971 when we were making 4 track recordings of orchestras, jazz bands and rock bands. We owned and ran a professional recording studio, just off from Nashville's famous Music Row, from 1979 through the early 90s before becoming a third-party developer of DragonDictate, the predecessor to NaturallySpeaking. Our nearly 40 years of microphone testing paints a slightly different picture and while we respect emicrophones efforts, we have to disagree with their findings and their test methods.

#1 The Samson Q7 will NOT work with soft voices without the assistance of a pre-amp. The Q7 is low impedance and not designed to be used with a computer soundcard. They're designed to be used as performing microphones with hotter live mixing boards. When attempting to pass the Audio Setup Wizard the Q7 barely moves the blue bar down 1 notch with a fairly loud voice and you can’t get better evidence than what is right in your face. Standard headset microphones will typically move the blue bar below the 50% mark and often go much lower. All any end user has to do is run the Audio Setup Wizard to verify our findings. You cannot beat the math.

#2 According to emicrophones, their Q7 microphone only works “optimally at a close distance”. Our Q7 microphones work from as far away as 4 feet and we include a 30 day moneyback no restock fee customer satisfaction guarantee so perhaps we should let the customers decide :)

We additionally recommend purchasing Speech Recognition Microphones, Digital Recorders and NaturallySpeaking software/utilities from Nuance Gold Licensed vendors because this gives you an extra layer of Nuance Certified tech support.

Please also note that our KnowBrainer 2007 command software is now freely available to the physically disabled and any forum member who has contributed 2000 more postings. You'll find additional KnowBrainer information in our What is KnowBrainer.

We understand you have a problem with our findings but our 30 day return policy removes any risk. We stand behind our findings and we really don't think people will have a major problem with our return policy which we introduced to the speech recognition community while embarrassing other microphone vendors who insisted on restock fees and a 15 day return policy.

If you understood how the now dated DNS 8 year old Audio Setup Wizard technology actually worked you would realize that all you have to do is speak a little louder when you run it initially to increase your noise cancellation and boost the signal but you're apparently unaware of this information or you would've mentioned it earlier. We're not telling you to sell your Q7 microphones and by all means feel free to guarantee that 6 inch or so range. Our customers will have a 4 foot guaranteed range. Enough said.

We don’t just sell microphones for every occasion. We ONLY sell speech recognition microphones, recorders and speech recognition software. Non-licensed Nuance vendors are not privy to the latest up to the minute information from Nuance development and level 1 premium tech support because they have no access to it and that is why we typically recommend purchasing Speech Recognition Microphones, Digital Recorders and NaturallySpeaking software/utilities from Nuance Gold Licensed vendors because this gives you an extra layer of Nuance Certified tech support.

Actually I understand a lot more than you think you know. In any event, Chuck Runquist who knows more than you (he has to correct your microphone and Dragon information constantly) and I put together has posted on your own forum how wrong you are.

Your >>> Chuck has to correct your microphone and Dragon information constantly <<< is a personal attack and you have been warned several times by the forum administrators against this type of behavior. If you want to continue posting on this forum, please discontinue with the personal attacks. You could be re-phrase your statement by saying we occasionally disagree. I'm not always right but neither is Chuck.

I'm not sure why you are bringing up Chuck Runquist or NaturallySpeaking and I didn’t notice a posting arguing my noise cancellation results on any other forum but neither Chuck or DNS have anything to do with the laws of microphone physics. My 40 plus years in the recording industry experience simply say otherwise and I believe I probably have more experience than you and Chuck combined in this particular area as I owned, produced and engineered in a recording studio for 15 years. This has nothing to do with NaturallySpeaking. Until you hit the saturation point (referred to as clipping in the music industry), the louder your input volume is, the more noise rejection you will acquire and this is just simple acoustic math.