Alright so a supplemental note here. I recently purchased a laptop that has enough power behind it to edit my videos and render them in a really rapid manner. I'm very happy with it! But there is something I forgot to record for my own interest and use next time I decide to start my work on a fresh computer.

It's very important that when you plug in the USB Blue Microphone (Nessie) that you go into the recording settings and make sure its set to 44100Hz CD Quality instead of 48K DVD quality. If you choose 48K you get a hissing static in the background of your recordings when you use Audacity. At 44K you don't get that problem. It drove me crazy trying to figure out what was causing that static and I thought it might have been a faulty USB port. On the old laptop I would change ports and the problem would go away, but I think that had more to do with clearing defaults each time.

Secondly, I had some sound quality issues on the recordings. S sounds were very harsh and sounded like the gain was up too high. After testing, I found that it sounded bad because the laptop was outputting HDMI to a television, and each had their own volume settings. If the gain on the laptop was too high it affected the sound quality on the output of the television. Turning the laptop volume down to 50 or less and then turning up the television volume resulted in clear sound with no more harsh S sounds.

I had a similar problem with my audio recordings a while ago. Recording too high creates a lot of audio clipping, so you have to record at a low volume and amplify it to get clear audio.

Not a driver issue, not a port issue, not a faulty microphone, just a combination of recording outside specified ranges that the microphone can support and gain balance issues between the laptop sound and television sound competing with each other.