The big thing to get across here when striving for great audio has to do with the mic placement and also how far away you are from the mic.
The most common type of microphone is the dynamic cardioid microphone, and how those work is there’s a magnet, a wire and a diaphragm, as you talk your voice creates sound waves or air pressure moving the wire in that diaphragm creating an electrical current that distinguishes the sound waves to send through the wires into your computer or recording device. With that in mind, cardioid is basically like a globe pickup pattern around the mic in the front and there's like a sweet spot where your voice will get the maximum recording quality.
The other big thing is how far away you are from the mic in that pickup pattern. A good rule of thumb is to have at least three to four fingers in between you and the microphone. Now when you are recording your podcast you don't want to move far away from the microphone, because of that cardioid pickup pattern as you move further away, you are going to get more room tone thus affecting your voice quality. So how close you are to the mic is detrimental to how good your podcast is going to sound.
The next thing we want to bring up here is not speaking directly into the mic, the mic should be off access. The reason why you don’t want to speak directly into the mic is that your plosives will pop the mic anytime you have a P or a B. If you speak a little bit off access to the mic you receive all those benefits of getting close to the mic but also you're not going to be cumbersome to your listeners by popping the mic every second.
The next thing we are going to talk about are headphones. For example whenever you are doing something like a remote podcast if the voice of the person you are talking to comes out from your speakers it will get back into your mic creating a kind of slap back delay.
The next tip we want to give you is to dampen the sound of the room that you're in. This is made possible by cutting the sound reflections as much as possible by using materials that absorb the reflected sound such as a couch, a pillow, a blanket or anything with cloth material. If you can’t dampen the sound while recording, there are some things you can do in post recording that will allow you to cut down on some of that reverb sound and that's with effects like noise reduction, adding compressions and EQ.
The good thing with this whole proximity effect of how close you are to the mic also brings up the bass and a lot of that "radio show voice" comes from the low frequencies. So what you want to do is to look up the parametric EQ in your editor to bring up a little bit of that bass and just tweak around with it bringing up a little bit of the highs too to bring in all those consonants adding clarity to your audio.
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