> Marantz microphone that curiously identifies as a Blue Snowball

If you don’t consider that a sign of a fake product, I don’t think you’re being objective. Fake products put significant effort into looking like real products, many times you need to take them apart to find the differences.

Some people just aren't concerned with brand names. If it looks and works like it's supposed to, and it didn't cost any more money, then what's the problem?

Certainly if it's 'really' a Blue Snowball rather than a Marantz MPM-1000U, I don't care, they're in the same price bracket from two respected brands. (I only chose between them on the basis that the Snowball was slightly more expensive at the time I ordered and aesthetically I preferred the Marantz. So really, if it were internally a Snowball and that was different, it would be a win?)

To be fair though it's not as clear as I was expecting, but I'm no expert so not really set up to do any proper testing, the room its in is probably acoustically awful anyway, etc. It's certainly not awful even if it isn't what it says it is, it's several steps up from the dirt cheap 'Tonor' branded and unashemedly 'Chinesium' thing I used before it.

The great thing about Amazon though is that after this thread I contacted support (way out of return period) and they've shipped a replacement. I'll see if it's the same; if it is, of course that doesn't prove anything, but I'll be very interested if it does seem (more - still wouldn't know for sure of course) real to see what the differences are in packaging/construction/printing etc.

Just to follow up on that, replacement arrived, ~this one identifies as 'USB Microphone'. Seems otherwise~ [edit: I mis-remembered which way around it was, they're both 'USB Microphone' on macOS, and both 'Blue Snowball' on Linux] identical, I think my assumption is still that both products are manufactured (genuinely) by the same factory, and the design even perhaps farmed out so they really are identical on the inside, but either way just flashed with the wrong ID.

Both of these two are identical inside too, same board revision even. (And not every penny pinched like you would if you were faking - gloss black solder mask, as well as on a second PCB whose only job is keeping wires tidy and displaying a silk screened revision number.)

[edit: Further to edit above, it's actually 'C-Media Electronics, Inc. Blue Snowball', and the main chip is this one: https://www.cmedia.com.tw/applications/microphone/CM6327A so presumably both microphones use it and the same assembly house (whether the same design or not) and the EEPROMs' manufacturer/product strings are either getting mixed up or all Blue, whether by mistake or assembler realised they could get paid double to flash once.]

Hm, is your thinking that it's unrelated to either and just clumsily faked by someone who fakes both?

That... yeah, good point. I don't know why that didn't occur to me before. (I was previously thinking they probably just genuninely use some same chips, or even both brands farm it out to the same shop, and both genuine microphones are the exactly same, just differently packaged.)

Just chiming in with basically the same experience: never had anything I could tell was fake, everything was pretty much what I expected for the price, and Amazon search is a complete and utter shitshow of uselessness.

For computer equipment, I shop NewEgg because their search rules. I wish there was a NewEgg for other stuff. I'm more than happy to pay more and wait a few days extra to have a search that doesn't suck.

Sadly, both NewEgg and BestBuy are "marketplaces" now, and amazon sellers have set up shop there too. They're smaller, so I hope there's a little better QA, but I'm not optimistic for their future