The Podcast Pedant

This is something that’s been bugging me for a while. As I keep moving along my own hardware and software path, adding bits and pieces as the money meanders in, I’ve come to the conclusion that the books and forums and that smartass who tells you what to do because he’s been podcasting two weeks longer than you all have it wrong.¹

Let’s say you have $100 to spend on your podcast. You want those dollars to go as far as possible to improving your sound. All of the above sources will tell you “buy a decent mic.” Either a USB microphone like the Snowball or Samson, or an MXL mic and a Behringer mixer to plug it into.

Am I right? Have you heard this advice before? It’s wrong.

Unless your current rig is a tin can with a string, the first money you put into your podcast should not go into improving your input. That’s step two. Your first hundred dollars should go into buying a good pair of headphones.

I’m speaking specifically to podcasters who do postproduction here. If you’re a “talk-and-send” podcaster, you don’t need this advice.² If you spend any time after you record on editing, compression, trying to improve the sound quality, you need to be able to hear your podcast. Most likely you’re listening through your computer speakers, or your iPod earbuds, or whatever Best Buy was selling with the best-looking numbers and graphs on the back. You probably think you can hear your podcast. You’re probably wrong.

I learned this lesson back in December. Before then I’d been doing the Best Buy thing, and I was editing my podcast with a $30 pair of Jensen headphones. I thought I was doing an okay job.

Then a little before Christmas, I went looking to upgrade a few things. I went to Guitar Center and tried a few studio headphones in the $100 range: Sony, AKG and Sennheiser. They all sounded great. The AKG set was by far the most comfortable, but I went with the Sennheiser HD-280 because it was a closed design so you could hear more at lower volume.

I took them home and listened to the podcast I’d uploaded the day before. The difference was night and day. I had no idea how many sound artifacts I’d been missing.

Since then I’ve been able to tune my noise reduction better, get more accurate EQ and compression, and catch more clicks and pops that I’d have missed otherwise. And that’s why I think you should put headphones before a better microphone: with good output, you can do better sound adjustments and compensate for defects. If you don’t have good output, you can’t tell what you’re not hearing.

The same advice would apply for speakers, of course. Even expensive computer speakers made for gaming won’t give you the sound reproduction you need: they’ll pump up the bass and try to make things sound artificially good. You don’t want pleasant sound, you want accurate sound when you’re editing. You need studio reference monitors. But those are very expensive, and lacking any knowledge of good monitor speakers in the $100 range, I’d say go for headphones first.

Then buy the better mic as soon as you’re able, because you’ll want it even more after you’ve got the studio headphones. Bad sound will start to get on your nerves, because it’s obvious and glaring. But I contend that if you can’t hear the mic properly first, there’s no point in improving it until you can.

1. Unless, of course, that smartass is me. But I’ve been wrong on this too. ↩
2. Nor my broader advice, which would be “Stop doing that.” ↩

From Sam Chupp, on the Yahoo! list:

I’ve found, once you receive your first microphone, it comes coated in some kind of psychotropic virus, that makes you suddenly start thinking about buying hundreds of dollars of additional equipment.

(Sam’s a personal friend of mine — I’ve run into him at various local gathers for years, and his role-playing podcast is philosophical and thought-provoking. I feel somewhat invested in the above quote, since if I recall correctly I pointed him toward his Samson C01U when we were chatting in Skype a while back. Does that make me a pusher?)

No, I’m not dead, and I never intended this blog to go dead for this long either. I’m sorry about that.

If you insist on an explanation, I think this is a pretty good one: I managed, almost accidentally, to pick up some contract programming work that is quickly blossoming into even more work. This is a good thing for two reasons:

1. The company’s product is related to podcasting. No, I can’t tell you about it yet. When I can, I will. But I think what they’re doing is rather cool.
2. The work might, in the next few weeks, become solid and stable enough to replace my day job with this, at least in the near- to mid-term.

This is a wonderful thing, because even if I’m doing the same amount of work I’ll be doing it from home, and I’ll have kicked the commute and have the flexibility to get more done with Escape Pod. (My immediate project manager and the company owner are Escape Pod fans, so they are quite willing to accommodate my needs there.) >8->

Anyway. That’s all bright and happy for the future, but in the meantime it effectively means I’m working three jobs: my day job, Escape Pod, and the contract gig. So, no time or energy for Pedant posting. It’s a shame, because there’s been a fair bit going on.

I’ll be trying to get some catchup done in the next couple days or weeks. Yes, I do want to talk about the latest Podshow kerfuffle, although I don’t have the time to get into it tonight. And I’ve been idly working on a couple of more technical pieces, too. Genuine how-to stuff.

I’m also amused to see that there are more people subscribed by Feedburner today than there were the last time I posted. So thank you, you few, you happy few, and I’ll try to make it worth your while from now on.

I already talked about this on Escape Pod, but it’s worth pushing everywhere. Mur Lafferty, of Geek Fu Action Grip and many other fine audio thingamapods, has gathered short stories that have been podcast by their authors and collected them into the first podcast fiction anthology. Voices: New Media Fiction is available free from Podiobooks.com and includes work by Cory Doctorow, James Patrick Kelly, Patrick MacLean, Tee Morris, and many others. Like all podiobooks, you can set up a personalized feed and get the stories at whatever pace you choose. Every day, twice a month, whatever works for you.

As a fiction author, I shouldn’t have to tell you how cool I think this is. Of course I’m also jealous because I’m not in it — but that’s my own damn fault for creating a podcast that only narrates other people’s stories. That’s cool, though. There’s always next year. Plenty of time for me to podcast that story about the antisocial young man who keeps getting set up for blind dates by his army of killer robots…

Chris Miller, of Unquiet Desperation:

This day is called the day of Podcasting Thursday : He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named, And rouse him at the name of Paul Puri. He that shall live this day, and see old age, Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say ‘To-morrow is Podcasting Thursday :’ Then will he strip his earbuds and show his scars. And say ‘These wounds I had on Podcasting Thursday’ Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot, But he’ll remember with advantages What feats he did that day: then shall our names. Familiar in his mouth as household words Michael and Evo, Brian Ibbot and Steve Eley, CC Chapman and Leo Laporte, Curry and Winer, Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d. This story shall the good man teach his son; And Podcasting Thursday shall ne’er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remember’d; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition: And gentlemen in cyberspace now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Podcasting Thursday.

Don’t even ask what the context was. It’s not one-tenth as cool as this.