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.” ↩