Part 1: Dynamic Microphones for Podcasting

in this two-part series we're going to talk about podcasting and streaming microphones and in the second part we'll talk about voiceover microphones [Music] in the first part of this series we'll talk about podcasting and live-streaming microphones now there's no hard and fast rule but I want to talk about the kind of general differences between them and then that will help you hopefully decide what makes more sense for your particular situation so this is just going to be talking about microphones I have personally used and in most cases that I've owned so you can hear samples of them on my particular voice it's just a data point this is not a definitive review that will identify the perfect microphone because a I don't believe there is a perfect microphone and be your voice is different than mine your preferences for what kind of sound you like is different is potentially different than mine there's just so many factors so let's just go ahead and have a discussion here tell you what I know about these microphones and hopefully that will help you in your decision about which microphone makes most sense for you so first let's talk about another thing that I think is a little bit of a myth some people are of the opinion that you can use any microphone in the world and in post you can use an equalizer or an EQ plug-in to tweak the sound to make it sound like any other microphone in the world or make it sound perfect on your voice and while I agree that an EQ or an equalizer is a great tool and it you can do a ton with it you can often make two different microphones sound very very similar like a lavalier microphone and a boom microphone it doesn't always hold true that you can make it sound like any microphone or you can fix problems that may result when recording with a particular microphone let me give you some examples so for people that have a lot of siblings in their voice and that's the sizzling sound you get when the someone says a letter S or C like I just did here that's sibilance and some voices have more siblings and others mind tends to have a fair bit of siblings so the thing that I find that is if you're using a microphone that's very sensitive in the range where your siblings happens to be there's no amount of EQ you can take to remove the harmonic distortions that end up there in that frequency range once you've recorded your voice on that so my my take is that it's not always true that you can use any microphone in the world and the cheapest piece-of-junk microphone and in the end with some good EQ get the perfect sound I think you really do need to find a microphone that's gonna work best for your particular voice and so let's talk about some of the factors there so let's talk first about podcasting and live-streaming microphones which I kind of grouped together and then contrast that with voice over microphones because I think there is a difference in many cases so first of all for podcasting when I'm talking about an audio podcast in particular the voice that you record is the entire presentation that is it that is what your audience hears there's nothing for them to see so it's a hundred percent audio input for your content and so what that means is you have to present something to your audience that's easy to listen to that they don't have to crank the volume way up to hear that they don't have to jog the volume dial back and forth to adjust to your volume changes or your the volume changes between you and maybe one of your other hosts or guests so there are just a lot of factors there so those are some things you have to work out but also the audio doesn't have to be so awesome that it melts your audience and they just tune into your Hutton's because they don't care what you're saying they just want to hear your voice that doesn't you don't have to go you know so far and spend so much money and so much time that it sounds like the best audio recording anyone's ever heard but what you do need to do is you have to meet kind of a basic threshold there's a threshold below which you're going to lose your audience and that is if the audio is so bad that there's so much distracting ambient noises being captured that you get these wild fluctuations in volume those are the kind of things you have to avoid so let's talk about what goes into making a good recording I think one of the things that we find with podcasting and live streaming is a lot of times the recording is done or the live-streaming is done in environments that are not acoustically treated or not acoustically treated well so let me talk about that for just a minute especially for live streaming like gamers they have typically a PC in their room they've got fans going often with those custom builds they've got a ton of fans going and yes I understand they're using Noctua fans and their low rpm and their don't make as much noise that's all great but it's still noise and it's still sound that's generated in the room and it will still be picked up by a good microphone so you do have to be careful still even with the best fans and also if you have bare walls or even walls that have stuff on them but they're hard surfaces hard floors hard ceilings those are all surfaces that the sound is going to bounce off of and then bounce back into your microphone and you'll get this echoes sort of effect which is technically reverb so that can be really distracting for your audience as well so if you're going to be recording a live stream a podcast or maybe even voiceover in a room that's not acoustically treated my general advice is you probably want to go with a dynamic microphone and probably not want to go in most cases with a condenser microphone so the reason for that is that dynamic microphones generally do a little bit better in those cases where they don't pick up as much ambient noise they are usually have a very directional polar pattern so they have a cardioid polar pattern so anything coming in from the back of the mic here he is not going to be picked up nearly as much as anything from the front of the mic here so you have that working for you but also you basically have to work up right on top of them for them to even pick up your voice so any sound that's happening over here it's not gonna pick up as much of that and so this is just gonna work in your favor now there's also a cost to that you do need to have a preamplifier or an audio interface or something that you plug it into usually with an XLR cable that has a very good preamplifier and good analog to digital converters because you're going to be pushing these preamplifiers hard these kind of microphones dynamic microphones require a lot of amplification which is called gain sometimes on some devices it's just called input but any case what that is is that is amplification it's taking the very weak signal from the microphone and boosting it up to a usable level so that's the downside of using a dynamic microphone now it's not really a downside it's just something you have to keep in mind and you have to budget for a gear that will drive a good microphone like this so those are some considerations there so with that let's get you some samples first of all you've been listening this entire time so far to the shure sm7b it's a wonderful microphone you'll notice on the back here you have a couple of options here you can change the sound a little bit so you can sculpt it by adding a high-pass filter a high-pass filter is going to cut off some of the low frequencies so if this is - bumi sounding for your particular voice you might want to engage that high-pass filter and it will cut off some of that bass and it will sound a little bit more natural if that's the sound you're going for in addition to that it also has a high frequency or presence boost so if you have a particularly what I would call a dark voice that's a voice where you have maybe a good bit of low frequency energy and your boys a lot of bass but you don't have a lot of articulation and you certainly don't have much in the way of siblings the problem with those kind of voices when you're recording them it's nothing well I guess the problem with the microphone when you're recording those types of voices is that they don't sound very articulate and sometimes they can start to sound whoopi and in fact I've had in fact recently Jarrell dun dun described his voice on this microphone as a mouth full of mud and I think that's really a good description for people that have that type of voice is that it can start to sound just really muddy and wooly and that's not a great sound some people at first think oh that's amazing sound it sounds like FM radio announcer but the problem is it's hard for your audience to really hear that especially if they're gonna be listening in a moving car in a train and airplane or other loud environments where they're just using earbuds or something like that even the best ear buds still generally you can only boost the levels so high before you start damaging your hearing so it's really important I think to get a recording that's easy for people to listen to and so that's what that high-frequency presence boost can do if you have a darker voice it doesn't have a lot of articulation or sibilants in it you might want to boost that up and it will just make your voice sound a little clearer when I talk about each of the microphones I'll tell you whether I purchase them with my own money or they were given to me for free usually from the manufacturer this one I bought with my own money around I think it's $400 u.s. at the time of this particular video so I think he used to be 350 but the price has gone up it's become very popular amongst podcasters and you know I think it's a it's a good sound is it a natural sound not exactly but natural isn't necessarily always the goal just depends on your preferences but it is a good microphone for when you're gonna be recording in spaces that are not necessarily the best acoustically and you'll be able to work up nice and close on it like this I think this microphone will also work better for people that have brighter voices that is to say a little bit more articulation a little bit more siblings this tends to roll some of that off so this actually is my main microphone I use now for streaming because it kind of complements my voice a little bit better than some other the options we'll talk about now we're gonna bring up a microphone here that has been popular in the audio world for many many years I'm not here to say that this is the best microphone for podcasting or live-streaming I don't think it is I don't use it that often but I do have a soft spot in my heart for this microphone it's a shure sm58 it is a very first dynamic microphone that i purchased in my audio career I've owned it for now probably 10 on more than that twelve or fourteen years it's nearly in pristine condition it doesn't get a ton of use but if I do live sound this one will usually get pulled out if you're on a tight budget it might not be a bad option for a first podcasting mic now it's not perfect and it let me talk about some of its flaws so this is one that's been around since I believe the 1970s maybe 60s I can't remember the whole history of the mic but it is a kind of iconic sound and it's designed for voice so it's a vocal microphone it's mostly for stage performance but it does have kind of a nice warm low end to it and and also pretty crisp on the high end for some voices as well but I think if you have a very dark voice without a lot of articulation this may not be a great fit you don't feel like it it can get a little Wooley sounding especially if you work up nice and close on it like this this is just to show you what we would call the proximity effect where you get a lot more bass response when you're working up very close on the microphone now one of the problems with this microphone is implosives when I say the letter P like please bring Pizza pronto or Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers you probably got some plosives there and those are sometimes you can fix those in post but many times you can't so you want to prevent that from happening so if you do go with a microphone like this you will want to get a foam cover to put on the head to help dissipate those little puffs of air that come out of your mouth when you say the letter P or B so that's one thing to keep in mind you can also use a pop filter which is just a little piece of mesh that you put between the microphone and your voice and that also does the same thing where it dissipates the little puff of air before it hits a microphone capsule so those are some considerations there is this a highly recommended mic for podcasting probably not is it something I would potentially use for panel discussions if I had a panel discussion live vocals yeah I would potentially pull it out and it's another option that I have in my kit overall it's a fine way if you want to kind of get started with podcasting but you don't want to invest $400 in a microphone here's a way you can invest $100 in a microphone and you'll still have a microphone that can either easily be resold or be used for other purposes so for example maybe when you have a guest you put them on this and you have your other fancy microphone that fits your voice better so there are some thoughts on the shore sm58 next up we have the audio technica at2020 the ATR 2100 which is basically the same microphone I think the warranty might be a little different 2100 is silver instead of black otherwise it sounds I think pretty much identical the switch is a little different but otherwise very similar so what's the advantage of this microphone number one the price can be less than the shore sm58 or 57 which we looked at previously and it has some additional features so this actually may be a better choice for podcasting potentially this one sounded a little brighter to me than the than some of the other microphones so those people again with is very bright sort of articulation and sibilance this can be a little bit harsh in those frequencies but overall I think it's a really good sound I'll let you be the judge of that for yourself at least on my particular voice here so for those with darker voices this one may actually be a very good maybe a pretty good choice as far as dynamic microphones are concerned it does have an on/off switch which is good and bad I found that it's good from the standpoint that if you need to you know mute something for a while you can turn it off that's good it's not so good if you forget and you're like why you know or you get halfway through your recording and you realize oh I've never I haven't recorded anything yet because I had the off switch in the off position now obviously you should typically be monitoring to make sure but in any case that's one feature it has another thing it has is a USB output so you can go from this microphone directly into your computer without using any sort of other audio interface or a mixing board or anything else and so that's a real convenience feature the only downside is that the sound quality when you use that USB output is not quite as good in my opinion as a lot of other mixing boards or audio interfaces would be so the nice thing about this mic is you have choices you can use the XLR output into your own audio interface or mixer or recorder and you'll get a great sound in most cases or if you just need something that's really light really small and you just want to take the microphone in a USB cable you can do that as well I think there's a little bit of sacrifice in audio quality and I have another video where we actually reviewed this in more depth which you can go take a look at and get some samples both ways another nice feature on this is it has a headphone jack on the microphone itself so you can actually plug your headphones directly in there and listen and monitor and make sure that what you're getting you know there aren't any problems that everything's recording okay so that's another nice feature on the audio technica at2020 100 now before we move off this microphone there's another one that's very popular out there that is kind of similar to this it's called the samson q2u I believe people really like that microphone a lot of podcasters really like it it's inexpensive it's less than a hundred dollars the nice thing about it is that it's less than a hundred dollars it sounds good on most people's voices and I think it has the same feature set here the difference is in my experience and actually this this mic is not immune to it either but the due to you from my experience seems very very prone to pickup plosives so when you say P and B like we'll do here Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers it's the queue to you in particular seems to pick those up really readily so if you do use that microphone I think you really you really do need to invest in the foam wind cover not a big deal those are inexpensive and that's a great solution as well this is the electro-voice re 20 which is a four hundred and fifty dollar microphone so this is not a budget microphone but this is a professional broadcast dynamic microphone and this one has some interesting features first of all you can see by its design here it's a little bit different than we've seen on some of the other microphones it has this long longer tube it's much wider diameter I find that most of the wider diameter microphones generally sound to have a little bit more of that broadcast sound that rich low end to them this is no exception this one has a couple of things number one like the sm7b it also has a high-pass filter let me go ahead and turn that on here that's what the high pass filter turned on now relative to before when I first started talking on this we had the high pass filter turned off also probably in many cases easier to think of that as a low-cut filter so it gets rid of some of that Basie stuff makes it sound a little bit more natural depends on the sound you want this is now with the high pass filter turned off so the nice thing about this microphone is first of all you have that high-pass filter so you can choose and if you've got a variety of different microphones and this one's sounding really really woolly or Basie you can always use that high-pass filter to get it kind of in the same ballpark as some of the other microphones you're using because of the inbuilt pop filter in this long tube here you're much less likely to experience plosives with this microphone so it has all this material in here that diffuses those puffs of air before they get to the capsule so you're much less likely to get those that's a good thing so in terms of microphone technique it's pretty easy for someone to learn how to use this microphone they just need to stay up on it like right now I'm about three inches away from it so what else can I tell you about this microphone again I paid $450 bought it myself so nobody's twisting my arm to say anything special about this I will say this this microphone has a special magnet and as I understand I think if that is supposed to make it sound more like a condenser microphone and supposed to have much more response up in the higher frequencies and in fact I think you can hear that on my voice in particular it's just not a great fit because again that sibilance tends to get at least in my opinion and from my hearing it just gets a little too prominent it's a little too harsh some people like that sound again but this is not typically a microphone I would use on a bright voice or a voice with a lot of sibilants however what I find is my wife's voice sounds really good on this so typically when we are doing any sort of recording together and we're doing vocals she'll use this microphone my voice not such a great fit but it could be a good fit for yours again it's better probably for darker voices or or voices that don't have a whole lot of sibilants to them it's also not a budget mic but it's a solid mic that could serve you for several decades easily so well $450 seems like a price that's a little bit on the steep side it is a microphone that could serve you for a lot of years so there is a listen to a variety of different dynamic microphones and how they might be a good fit for you or maybe not such a great fit for you depending on the sound of your voice the sound you prefer to listen to in terms of how crisp you want something how articulate and how much sibilants you like to hear so hopefully that was helpful from that standpoint now you might ask yourself couldn't I just use these as voiceover microphones as well and the answer is yes of course you could however what I will say is that typically when you're doing voiceover recording you're looking for a little bit more detail especially in the higher frequencies and what happens with most dynamic microphones is once I get past about 15 kilohertz in terms of the overall frequency spectrum they tend to roll off and that's actually not a bad thing if you're recording in an acoustic environment where there's you know other stuff going on but when you're doing voiceover and you want that additional detail then a lot of times you're going to want to move to a condenser microphone that are typically a little bit more articulate and more sensitive up in the higher frequencies so that's where there's kind of a prints air in the next episode when we talk about condenser microphones for voiceover you'll hear a pretty substantial difference there OneNote microphone placement is really important with dynamic microphones you have to be up close to them to get the best sound out of them and you I know you've seen probably a thousand videos with people sitting like a foot away from their shure sm7b a they may not actually be that far away it may be kind of a camera perspective thing and be it may not be the most optimal setup if you do operate in that way if you get that far away from the microphone really a dynamic microphone you're supposed to be up pretty close on it to get the best signal to noise ratio that is to say capturing your voice and not picking up a lot of the ambient noise in the room so hopefully that was helpful for you if you have any questions go ahead and leave those down below and if you've not already subscribed make sure you do that and we'll be sure to get you more great videos on how to improve your lighting and sound for video talk to you soon [Music] you

Channel: Curtis Judd

Views: 88,583

Keywords: audio, sound, video sound, video audio, microphone, mics, podcast, livestream, streaming, podcasting, Shure sm7b, Electrovoice re20, Shure sm58, audio technica at2005, Samson q2u, audio technica at2100

Id: RX3mgP09St8

Length: 21min 34sec (1294 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ipreferpeanutbutter]

Very decent review, but I wonder whether he may be confusing the RE20 with the RE27 N/D.

Whereas the RE20 uses a more traditional magnet in the center of the voice coils, the latter uses a neodymium magnet. That change in magnet and consequential tech choices does give it a much brighter sound that’s akin to a condenser sound. To my ear, it’s forward like the AKG C214, although much less sibilant than AKG’s offering.

Both have the variable-D technology help eliminate proximity effect. Coincidentally, that’s the technology that makes EV’s mics so easy to use. Throw in tank-like build quality and full presence sound, and its no wonder they’ve been in broadcast studios for literally decades.