When Kaotica claim you can 'professionally record your vocals anywhere and at anytime' and that the Kaotica Eyeball 'captures your pure vocal tone without any coloration', and when there's videos all over YouTube by people who really seem to know what they are talking about, stroking it like it's some kind of exotic pet; $200, even for a ball of foam, seems like a good deal, no? So, yeah, I did it and went and bought one.
I'm in between studios until I move home and have held off on professionally treating my space in favour of a make-shift approach and some cleverly arranged soft furnishings, which has certainly done the trick, but taking a smidge of reverb out would help, and besides, I dream of the ability to record anywhere and becoming some kind of mic-wielding jungle-dwelling voiceover nomad, or recording from my nuclear submarine whenever the mood takes me. But I'd settle for being able to record when it rains on my skylight.
But frankly, after a series of comparison recordings, i'm disappointed. It does indeed remove an element of the reverb from a reflective room, but at the cost of sounding like you're talking to your mic through a blanket! It saps every drop of ring out of your sound and dampens it to a pulp. Suddenly your work sounds muffled and boxed and unfortunately it doesn't do the job it promises in cutting out subtle ambient noise either. It does to a degree, but it's not up to the hype. The notion that you could record on a beach or in a New York apartment above a busy street is totally absurd in my opinion - both notions I came across and got excited by (in that order...ahem), when window shopping.
There are a lot of Youtubers reviewing this thing and raving about it - and as with any gushing review these days, don't forget to look at it sideways. The spin spun me, but in practice i'm disappointed to be $200 down and I continue to work with my unsheathed microphone as my eyeball glares at me from the other side of the room!
It may be effective in emergencies - ie you're on holiday and you have to deliver something acceptable to a client from your hotel room, and this is what i'll keep it for, but the loss of sharpness and clarity is a let down.
I'd re-write the line 'Professionally record your vocals anywhere' to 'Record your vocals to a passable standard anywhere (providing it's just as quiet as where you'd normally record)'. I'd record you some examples and comparisons but i've got work to do - I mean, who has time to do an indepth review of something like this without being paid by someone to do it..? *sideways look to the camera*
Props to their marketing team, though - the mark up on a foam ball with a hole cut out the middle must be phenomenal!