Tools for Creating Your Own Audio Files--Microphones and Headsets

As promised, we are now going to offer advice on what tools to buy if you want to create your own audio files for your podcast.  Please note these two caveats:

1. Personal taste matters.  The human ear is a strange, picky, idiosyncratic device.  Wine experts will argue for years over the merits of a certain vintage--audio experts do the same about audio equipment.
2. This is a technology area, so everything changes, all the time.  New products come along every five minutes and a certain model of equipment can disappear from the shelves, overnight.

Because this area is so plastic, we hope you will chime in with your comments and ideas. Our goal is to help people start producing audio files that will be cleaned up and distributed using a tool such as Sonibyte.

If you were planning to become a professional voiceover artist, you would buy a high-quality condenser microphone.  You would then work in a sound-proof room and feed your signal into a high quality pre-amplifier.  You would do things like put filters into the system to adjust the sound, use different microphones for different jobs, and would worry about little things like keeping things that have fans (like your computer) outside the room.  If you are in this mode, you'd visit sites such as Recording Hacks and its "How to use a microphone database" or Nurple.com's great post on microphones.

In contrast, we will assume that you just want to record a telephone interview with a guest who works from home.  There will be an ocassional door slam, some dog barks, and a few long moments of silence when one of you is trying to figure out what to say.  (Hopefully no crying babies and neither of you will have a cold!)  A basic choice that our staff likes is the MXL 990.  It will cost you about $60.  You can find more good suggestions for less expensive microphones on the Musician's Friend Web site.

Once you've recorded your sound, you need use a good set of headphones to listen to what you've done, so you can check and be sure it is OK.  Our staff likes headphones from AKG (the AKG K240 is good), AudioTechnica (such as the ATH M20) and Sony (such as the MDRV250V).  They haven't tried Sennheiser's headphones (such as the HD 201), but suspect they will be pretty good, based on how well Sennheiser's other microphones perform.  You can also buy a combo headset and microphone.  Our staff suggest you look at the Yamaha CM500.  They cost only about $50.

We've linked above to Amazon for each microphone and headphone we mention above.  You'll see that the prices for these components range from $16 to $90.  You may be able to get better deals, newer (or older) models, or other headsets that work just fine.  These headsets should all work OK with either Macs or PCs, but take a good look at the jacks on your computer to be sure they are standard minijacks.

Podcasting continues to look pretty inexpensive, doesn't it?  In the next post, we'll look at audio capture software, some of which is even cheaper (free!).

Comments

[jeux ds]

I was in search of these tools since from many days. I wan to create my own audio files. Now these tools will be useful to me. Thanks for sharing such useful information here. It is so important for me. Well I like this site.

[jeu enfant]

Hi...
Podcasting lectures lets students listen when it best suits them. For capturing large amounts of lecture content and quickly making it available, BoilerCast at Purdue University is an ideal tool. Podcasting is often described as TiVo for audio because it permits time shifting of audio content.