Ventrilo definitely reduces the resolution of any mic you use to save space, making it sounds “worse” than if you record raw into a real DAW (listen to Cuba in the hog segment versus elsewhere in this cast, it’s the same mic/room but he recorded the former in Audacity as a pickup and it clearly sounds better)…but PM me a screenshot of your audio settings anyway because I’m curious. You probably have it set up correctly.
I think your mic sounds good, generally speaking (elaborate joke podcasts aside, it’s above the curve on most SB podcasts for general quality) but I also agree it should maybe sound a little better than it does, being a condenser mic. Also make sure it’s set to CARDIOID WITH -10dB PAD and get fairly close to it (6-8 inches). After that just make sure you’re not clipping in your hardware setup and you should be golden.
Also I’m gonna repost an email I sent to a friend for anyone in the market for anything that’s not just “headset mic” (though that’s usually fine for our stuff)
When asked about this, I usually recommend a Dynamic USB mic with a tabletop stand. These are similar to what vocalists in bands use live. Since they are dynamic (not phantom powered) they are less sensitive and don’t bleed as much with other sound sources in the same room. The trade off is that they don’t sound as nice because they pick up a narrower frequency range, and you have to get pretty close to them when you speak…but the trade off of being able to record in a room that has poor acoustics will give you a better sounding final product.
Here is a well rated mic along these lines (includes tabletop tripod stand):
and you should also get one of these to cut down on distortion from plosives:
The cool thing about that Audio Technica mic is that you can plug
headphones in directly so you can monitor your own voice with no
latency. [/details]
I literally bought an extremely similar mic on Bradley Coma’s recommendation back when I thought I was an LPer. It does just fine considering I record directly next to a box fan running on high.
I finally actually listened to this and holy balls it is fantastic
console talk is still probably my favourite thing I’ve ever done on one of our podcasts, and definitely my favourite thing I’ve ever done with @Father.Torque
For real, I re-listened to it at some point and I was like “who wrote that segment” and then remembered partway through that I did. It’s been a fucked up year!
You sent me the script to add stuff to and I wanted to find a polite way to tell you that you were nuts for not realizing it was perfect as it was and there was no way I could ever imagine any way to improve it.