Well, I've had three or four days to mess around with the Samson USB mic, and so far I am more than pleased with my purchase.
Setup/installation is totally painless—just connect one end of the included usb cable into the mic and the other end into your computer’s usb port and you’re all set to record.
Though the mic will work with or without installing the Samson drivers, the downloadable drivers do give you some added options in terms of adjusting the input gain (it even has a handy, real-time meter that tells you when your sound is getting clipped) and a low cut/high pass filter that allows you to adjust the exact frequency at which the low-frequencies getting picked up by the mic are rolled-off, or attenuated.
As for the mic’s overall sound quality, I’m far from being an audio authority, but given the extremely low entry-price, the actual recorded quality of the audio seems to have an impressive sense of depth and clarity. In fact, the thing is so sensitive that it seems well-served in accentuating the noisiness of my practice amp--whose primary speaker is partially damaged--the general inconsistency in my playing technique, and the ever-present buzz of my very-close-by computer fan. Basically, the mic sounds superb if you’re in a properly “sound-proofed” area, but if your recording area has some acoustical flaws, this mic will have no trouble pointing them out to you. Thankfully though, the mic’s usb cable is long enough that you should be able to distance yourself from your computer so that its cooling device(s) don’t get picked up during recording.
One sentence summary: Samson’s CO1U is certainly worth a shot if you’re looking for a cheap, quasi-professional-sounding condenser mic.
I went ahead and spliced some rough sound samples sans post-production (as recorded in Audacity) for anyone that wants to hear the thing in action with some seriously low-end gear (specifically, a Squier P-Bass as played on the above-mentioned noisy and somewhat busted Bassman amp):
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Also, to exemplify the quality of the mic’s vocal-capturing capabilities, I slapped together several layers of vocals set at varying frequencies; the resulting clarity is quite pleasing (or perhaps in this case, the word "disturbing" is more appropriate?):
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