Episode: 4461
Title: HPR4461: Battle of the mic's
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4461/hpr4461.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:55:51

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4461 from Monday 8 September 2025.
Today's show is entitled, Battle of the Mikes.
It is part of the series podcasting how-to.
It is hosted by Lee and is about 6 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Lee compares recording with some different microphones.
Hello I'm Lee.
Today I'm going to compare some of the different microphones I've been using to make
computer-based audio recordings.
Since I started recording episodes for HPR a few years ago, I've used quite a few
different recording cell-ups.
My training in Georgia came first from having experimented with 8-bit sampling on a 16-bit
computer called Nataria ST in the 1990s.
Much later I've volunteered for a few years as a recording technician for a local talking
newspaper for the blind.
Here I'd come into contact with near-professional-level recording equipment such as XLR microphones,
a mixing desk, and high-end discrete sound cards.
The studio there was not exactly soundproofed but the high-quality mics made up for this.
The equipment I've used for recording podcast episodes has mainly been USB plug-in mics
for a PC or built-in mics for devices such as an iPad tablet or a laptop computer.
The results in terms of audio quality are varied considerably and it has been a learning
process and progress has not necessarily been in the positive direction.
Sometimes I've been hindered by recording at night and so speaking in a low voice.
Other times there have been people moving around, I've been moving myself introducing
little odd artefacts.
My flat, both the current one and the previous one on the same estate, is near a police station,
so often there have been frequent sirens in the background.
Then when it came to editing and processing, I've sometimes manually adjusted the volume
sentence by sentence quite painstakingly and tried to minimise breaths which were a normal
part of the recording process.
These often the courgettes prior to a sentence where the speaker would do a quick intake
of breath.
I never used the effect known as compression, not to be confused with data compression,
before I heard it talked about during one of the talks I'll camp last year.
This seemed to save me a lot of time once I knew how to apply it, although like any powerful
tool I've come to appreciate that it's best used sparingly.
In addition I've often used noise reduction.
All these tools are available in my sound editor of choice called Audacity.
Now data compression is a separate issue.
This can diminish the quality of sound if the bit rate is too low.
With lossless formats like FLAQ, being the best in terms of quality since they leave
the original sound unchanged, while still making the file size smaller.
You would think file size was unimportant on today's multi-terabyte computers, but sometimes
wanting to share a copy with a collaborator on Discord where the maximum is 10 megabytes,
as forced me to compromise on quality.
After some recording software like VoiceMemo and the iPad introduce its own audio compression
settings, and some more geo-editing apps will only save at a low quality, unless the
paid for versions purchased.
And while I'm usually willing to purchase software that is only available on proprietary
platforms, if it's useful, I'm reluctant to do so if it's something I'm just trying
out or intend to use only once.
Anyway, I'll now come to the point of today's episode.
That is, I've been finally persuaded to pay more attention to the kit I'm using to
record, by someone you might know from this community podcast, who goes by the name of
Elspeth.
She knows me quite well by now, and recognises some of my reluctance to invest in things
that I consider to be for myself, rather than for someone else.
What I've set up and am using the first time today to make a recording is an AKG Pro
audio liro mic, with a sensec boom arm and an AOKO pop filter.
Bear in mind, it's the hot summer's day and I have the windows open, and I'm on the
main road, the A232 that runs east to west across the southern tip of London.
This is a bit of an experiment, I'll try and submit this as a flag, and trust it might
go unmolested by any of the janitors, so you get to hear exactly what I've recorded.
I'm now going to record a short clip on each of the series of different mics and devices.
These will be not necessarily in this order.
My iPad Pro using the software called Voicememmo, then for the rest in audacity.
The MacBook Pro built in microphone, the Ancomi Co usually conference with on my PC.
The headset link on my Bose quiet comfort QC noise cancelling earphones, the new AKG microphone
on the boom arm with pop filter.
This is the Bose headset microphone.
This is the MacBook Pro microphone.
This is the Ancomi microphone.
And this is the AKG microphone.
This is an iPad Pro microphone.
My initial thoughts listening back to these are as follows.
The Bose headset does the best job on cutting out background noise without me having done
any noise reduction on it.
The MacBook Pro has the loudest amount of background noise, although I feel it is the
sort that might be easily amenable to noise reduction filtering without loss of quality
of the voice.
The Ancomi microphone does well with cutting out noise, but the quality of the voice is pretty
low.
I think the Ancomi is a conference mic, so maybe there has been a compromise between
being able to pick up speech from all around versus the sound quality.
The AKG microphone whilst containing a slight amount of background noise seems very clear
and crisp to me.
The iPad microphone is a good all round sound as well.
My conclusion is for noise cancelling at all costs, I prefer the Bose, but for general
speech recording I like the AKG or the iPad Pro, though those two have a slightly different
characteristic, respectively, which is hard to describe.
I'll play the clips again so you can make your own judgement.
This is the Bose headset microphone.
This is the MacBook Pro microphone.
This is the Ancomi microphone.
And this is the AKG microphone.
This is an iPad Pro microphone.
Okay, well that is really all I have to talk about today.
I know talking about audio equipment, recording, editing and such is a common topic on this
community podcast, so if you find this topic interesting I'd suggest doing a search
through the HPR catalogue for other episodes on similar vein.
Thanks for listening and bye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio, and Hacker Public Radio does work.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcasts, you click on our contribute link to find out
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On the Sadois status, today's show is released under Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0 International
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