Are USB microphones better for speech recognition?
Universal serial bus (or USB) microphones have the advantage of having the analog-to-digital converter in the microphone. Therefore, many of the microphones and the converters are far away from the computer. It is good to keep the microphone away from the computer because the computer creates electromagnetic noise. When you maintain distance between the computer and the USB microphone, the USB microphone should, in theory, provide a higher-quality digitized sound. However, for analog uses, such as Sound Recorder, the USB microphone may seem inferior because of the clipping of the digital signal that the microphone produces. A USB microphone uses electricity from the CPU instead of electricity from the processor on your sound card. This can additionally reduce noise and increase accuracy, but it also increases the processing load on the CPU. If you have a high-quality microphone and sound card, but a slower CPU, you might experiment with your system before you purchase a USB microphone.
