The Rock Band official microphone has a silver grill, the Rock Band logo on its shaft, and a nearly fifteen foot long cable. How does it perform?

First, a bit of background. We have all the Rock Band games, all the Guitar Hero games, and a variety of other games as well. My boyfriend plays in a band, and I sang in choirs throughout school. So we are both fairly musical and have quite a lot of gear in the house. My boyfriend's been gigging for over twenty years. He understand issues of microphone noise, feedback, sensitivity, and so on.

We own not only multiples of this Rock Band microphone but also the Konami microphone, EA microphone, Guitar Hero microphone, Logitech microphone, and others.

We're extremely pleased with this Rock Band microphone. Looks-wise, the silver grill does look snazzy. The long length is a great help when you are stretched out in a room with drum players, guitar players, and keyboard players. The Rock Band cable has a "box" near the XBox end which has an image of a microphone on it. This is great when you're trying to figure out which cables to unplug and which not to touch.

But of course it all comes down to the microphone's performance. A gorgeous microphone which causes you to continually fail will get tossed into the trash rather quickly.

Luckily, as you might imagine, the Rock Band team made absolutely sure that their branded microphone would work well. They wouldn't want to be deluged with complaints that reaching 100% on a song in easy mode was impossible. I have tried these microphones on pretty much every song I can get my hands on, on expert mode, and I routinely get to 100%. I know it's hard to read tone in an email - I don't mean that in a boastful way. I know many, many people who can do that and who are far better singers than I am. What I mean is that the microphone doesn't distort or affect your rhythm or pitch. It transmits - accurately - your voice's twists and turns and gets it into the core machine.

As an added advantage, the microphone ends in a simple USB plug. This means this unit can move between the Wii, PS3, and XBox 360 units. So if you have multiple systems, like we do, you can move this high quality microphone between them.

Highly recommended.

We purchased our microphones with our own funds in order to do our testing and reviews.

Buy the Rock Band Official Microphone from Amazon.com