After years of fiddling with our setup, the current FIYH lineup is (4x) a Shure SM-58, standard windscreen, $45 boom arm from Guitar center, standard XLR, Behringer Xenyx 1002B mixer board, and a laptop running Audacity. (And a second laptop running vMix and a webcam or two, along with some graphics and line-input.)

I've also got some nice pop filters I've never even used.

I think you can get a 58 in decent shape for sixty or seventy bucks, and it'll last you the rest of your life. It'd last you the rest of your life if you used it as a hammer on off-days.

For single use, I highly reccomend the Blue YETI usb mic.  I got mine for Christmas and for the VO work Ive had to do it's been great.

Never thought I'd agree with a Scot.

Does the Blue Yeti have to be planted on my desk, or can I take off the stand and attach the mic to a boom of some kind?

Yeah, it has a threaded mount on the underside to attach to a mic stand.

<Also uses a Yeti. Mainly for Let's Play recording, plus a bit of narration/VO stuff, haven't had an issue yet.

I can imagine, given how expensive it is. Too rich for my blood. Sure looks nice, though.

I'll third the Yeti. It's fairly inexpensive, and plugs directly into USB. My setup is a dynamic Behringer XM8500 XLR mic, wired through a Roland UA-55 audio deck, but for podcasting, it could wind up being overkill in the long run.

If not, get a Røde NT1-A and an audio deck. You won't regret it for a second, although the price is a bit steep for the complete setup. One that studios use to capture vocals, too.

Believe it or not, the following is a controversial statement in some circles: the microphone will only guarantee you about sixty percent of the possible quality-of-output. As in, "which mic do I plug in and talk to?" To get to one hundred percent of the possible quality-of-output, you have to know your stuff in the engineering phase and in the mixing phase. Without knowing your stuff on both ends, a $15,000 microphone will sound virtually identical to a $300 microphone to most people. As in, if people were used to hearing your show with the $15k mic, and you did an episode with the $300 mic, it'd be really unlikely for someone to leave a comment like "what's with the drop in quality?"

Accordingly, if you're fairly solid at engineering your recording for best results, and plussing your audio in the mix for best results, you can make even a fairly low-end microphone sound awesome. (Note for posterity: I do not lay claim to FIYH's audio being awesome. I think it's good, it could be better, and could be better if I spent more time mixing it. I just don't, because I'm lazy and we're past the threshold I cared about quality-wise.)

At a certain point, this conversation should be about your recording and mixing techniques, and not so much about which mic you use.

This is not to say all mics are created equal — it's not even to say all mics within the same general price range are created equal. When we did my album, Andy set up a handful of various Really Nice Mics and had me sing a verse into each of them. It's called a shoot-out. Some microphones just have inherent qualities that vibe well with some voices, and there's a tiny little benefit to be found in isolating the right mic for the right person. But the overall value of the right mic, compared to the overall value of the right setup and mixing, is pretty slight. Especially when we're talking about radio.

This is a long way of saying two things:

1. You can go wrong buying a mic, but it doesn't sound like you're likely to, so don't kill yourself over it.
2. Don't expect the mic to do the work, if better quality is your goal. You can make a shitty mic sound warm.

Here's what I would suggest:

1. Two programs, Skype and Audition. Nothin' else. (Unless MP3 Skype Recorder counts as a third thing, in which case, that too.)

2. Record your audio locally in Audition, and set up MP3SR to only record the co-host's audio, not both of yours.

3. Upon completion, save off a copy of your local recording, just for safety. Then find a "silent" part in your recording — there will be a lot, every time the co-host is talking, you're not — and sample it, run noise removal, do that whole thing. The steps in order are: select a couple seconds of silence, Shift-P, then Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-P. Shift-P samples the audio, C-Shift-P opens the noise removal interface. Here's the settings I use, load that. Select Entire File. Apply.

4. New multitrack session matching your recording settings, bring in your audio. On the track your audio is on, add a quick track preset. (Window -> Effects Rack, if it's not already open.) Set it to Track Effects instead of Clip Effects, and just drop on one of the vocal presets. Try Radio Announcer Voice. It runs a quick compression on your audio, excites the highs and lows, and then runs a limiter on that for further volume management. Done. Don't even have to set it up or tweak.

5. Import your co-host's MP3. Double click on it to go into that track, run noise removal on that. Go back to your multitrack, add the MP3, sync 'em up.

6. Do your editing, if you wanna edit. Hitting R once opens the track razor tool, to make cuts in a track. Hitting R twice loads the session razor, which will make a cut down all the tracks ya got. You'd wanna use that one, because the tracks are synced now. In fact, if you session-razor cut at the point you want to start removing, and then session-razor cut at the point where you want to pick back up on things... switch back to the cursor tool and select both tracks in that "to be cut" area. Shift-Backspace. The selected area ripple deletes, dragging your remaining tracks up to fill the gap.

7. The bottom track in your stack (Track 7, appropriately enough), is the Master Track. Anything you do to that track applies to everything. There's a little Sum-To-Mono button on every track, but if you hit it on the Master, you only have to hit it once. Looks like this: ((O)) Hit that, and export.

The result is the same thing you were previously doing, only it sounds a lot better, a lot faster, with a lot less manual labor and software switchery.

Throw in a little bit of effects processing beyond this for warming you up, and it's possible you don't even a new mic.

*shrug*

Can anyone recommend a basic, 4-channel mixer? I looked at the one Teague uses but I don't need that many inputs.

I've toyed with the idea of moving to a little Berenger mixer and XLR mikes, but I don't think you get much of a quality boost until you add an in-line compressor-limiter. You mainly get flexibility to expand your mikes and other inputs (phone, instruments, etc.).

Of course, if that's what you're looking for, then I suggest googling "podcasting equipment" and seeing what Podcast Answer Man and others have to say about various boards.

Last edited by Zarban (2014-05-26 23:01:25)

Yeah, there's some software I've heard of that can somehow pull audio from two different USB mikes. I don't have a second USB mike or I would have tried it.

EDIT: By the way, to return to your original question, I've been looking at the Rode Podcaster, which YouTube reviews suggest has pretty much all the advantages of the Heil PR-40 at 2/3 the cost and with a USB connection (the Rode Procaster is the XLR version). These are all dynamic mikes rather than condensers like the Snowball and my Samson C03U, so they don't pick up room noise or people on other mikes.

I have a very inexpensive ($18 back in 2008) boom arm stand for my mike that I'm really happy with, so don't think you have to pay a lot for that. I agree that it's waaay more convenient than a desk stand. And I wouldn't bother with a shock mount. Anyone with a decent setup and an ounce of somatic feedback can avoid bumping the mike. Also, I use a foam ball-type windscreen and immediately ditched the clumsy goose-necked pop filter I'd bought. (However, you have to speak directly into a dynamic mike, so a stand-out pop filter might be a little more effective than the foam ball.)

Last edited by Zarban (2014-05-28 16:06:43)