hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3544.txt

Episode: 3544
Title: HPR3544: All my microphones
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3544/hpr3544.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 01:12:30

---

This is Haka Public Radio Episode 3544 for the first day of March 2022.
Today's show is entitled All My Microphones.
It is hosted by Andrew Conway and is about 11 minutes long and carries an explicit flag.
The summary is a show recording using every microphone I had to hand.
Hello Haka Public Radio people, this is McNallow here, also known as Andrew.
And in this episode I'm just going to try out a whole bunch of microphones I have lying
around.
The reason I'm doing this is because it occurred to me that I don't really know how
good or bad my different microphones are in that host, so I thought it might be an
nice idea to test this out.
Now the first microphone I'm using, let me just check it out, I'm in fact using it.
Yeah, I think I am.
The first microphone I'm using is my Blue Yeti, so this should be my best microphone.
I say it's my best microphone, it's something I want my most expensive microphone.
But I have heard when I've been using it in Zoom and Jitsy calls and the like, one person
complained that my voice sounded too clear and booming, in other words it stood out amongst
other people with laptop mics.
So maybe, maybe the highest quality isn't always best when people's expectations are for
something lower quality, maybe high quality microphone might not be appropriate, I don't
know, I guess it's in the ear of the beholder.
So yeah, this is the first microphone, I'm going to try them out in the order that I
expect them in dissenting order of quality, so as I say starting with this Blue Yeti,
which is first.
I'm also in the quietest room in the house with all the doors shut, the cats are somewhere
else and the children are at school.
So I think this will be a fair test, I've got a slightly gravely voice, I've got a
cold at the moment, no, it's not COVID, definitely a cold, and so that may affect the recording
to some degree.
But I'll try and keep as much as possible the same, and where I can, I'll use my laptop,
but I'm going to have to use my phone later on for, well, because I'm going to be using
the microphone on my phone at one point, see how that compares.
Okay, so this is the end of the Blue Yeti segment, I shall be back in a moment with I think
my trusty old USB headset, see you in just a second.
So this is my trusty old USB headset, I bought this about 10 years ago, I think I needed
a headset, I ran from my office in the centre of Glasgow over the river Clyde to the nearest
shop, which was called Mapplin, which people who live in the UK will know of, I know that
sadly no longer exists, but then usually pay over the odds for anything in Mapplin, so
it kind of, yeah, I couldn't see why you would want to go there when you buy the same thing
like at half the price on the internet, anyway, I digress, but this was worth the money because
however much I paid for it and it wasn't cheap, this headset has served me well over the
years and it's foam that's around the earpieces have fallen off, but the Microsoft boom is
still perfectly good, you can decide for yourself how the quality stacks up against the Blue Yeti,
which I just tested out, and then the next I think will be the built-in microphone on my laptop,
that'll be the next one I'll try. Yeah, even without the foam in the ears, it's still comfortable,
the hardware still works, so the latest updates mean the mute button doesn't work, but the volume
button still work on the microphone at the headset rather, it's plantronics, that's all I know
about it, that's the chip set inside it, I don't really know anything more than that, and you know,
any headset that can take the beating I've given it over the last 10 years or more and still holds
together, and someone's okay, must be doing something right, even the wiring's working, so that's
the plantronics headset, my trusty old headset, next up I think will be the laptops internal microphone
very exciting, see you in a second. Hello and this is the internal microphone in my laptop,
now there might be microphones that might be stereo, but I'm just recording a mono track,
all of these will be in one one, I don't see the point in testing stereo, and some of them aren't
stereo in fact, so the other thing I should point out is that usually when I'm recording for HPR,
I'll leave five seconds of silence at the beginning and use that to subtract the noise level,
using a Dusty's noise removal feature, but I'm not going to do that in this case because I want all
the microphones to shine through the warts and all, so if you hear lots of hissing, well, that's why,
and I also should point out that this, although I'm using my laptop for this in the last three,
next, I think I'm actually normally going to do one more test on my laptop, but after that,
I'll have to switch over to my phone for the last two, which I don't know if it will be the worst
quality, maybe this, I think a presume it's going to be my little earbud things, wireless earbud
things, I'm fird reports, they're the worst, but we'll see, so next up, I'm going to attempt
to use the microphone jack plug, what's combined headset and microphone, output and input, microphone,
jacks or three-way, left, right, out and microphone in, for some reason this laptop,
this never seems to play very well, so I don't know how respond to be plugging in something that
is just only a microphone and has no headphones at all, we'll soon find out, and so the next
thing, it might be that, but if I can't get it working, it will be my phone, I think, anyway,
I shall see you in just a minute. Well, I'm now using a plug-in microphone as in it,
plugs in with a jack, I'm not at my laptop, it works, I just couldn't get it to work at my laptop,
I'm also in a different room, I'm sat at my son's PC, it's a desktop PC, so it's possible you can hear
it wording in the background, because it's sat underneath the desk, the microphone is on,
it looks like a stereo microphone, I don't know if it's a recording stereo or not, and I'm
having to use a voice recorder app on Windows, because I sound as PC, it's on Windows 10,
nothing I can do about that, so I don't know, does it sound okay? This is the one, this is a microphone,
he uses all the time, he likes to show to his friends through the microphone, have speakers,
and all kinds of echoing going on, I'm not sure why, but anyway, it seems to be a fairly decent microphone,
I remember finding it, it's really good, as a room mic for recompturing, we're doing
conference calls, that's what I bought it for, that's the scene vintage, it's my headset,
a while back, 10 years old, and it's a cheaply one, I think it had a more expensive one that took
on a little coin battery, you know, the CR, really 2032, something like that, to get an exact
number, you know, a ship like a coin, but it used to basically eat one of those batteries every
hour or two, so that was useless, very expensive microphone, we didn't plug it into the maintenance,
and so I think, so I bought this cheaper, less good microphone, which actually, not only did it
eat batteries, but it was quality, it was just as good as more better, and it was not hard for me,
without a lot cheaper than that, but it's big too, really, so that's this one, I think next up,
so now I'm on my phone, I'm just using my phone as my microphone, I'm actually standing up,
walking around, so I'm not quite the same position I was before, but I'm next to my laptop,
back in the room with it, I don't know, how does it sound to you? Not much to say, this is a,
well, I should say, it's a Samsung S9 Plus, Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus, I think, I've had it for a few
years now, running Android 10, I think, and I'm using the Voice Recorder app of no idea whether
it came with the phone, whether I installed it, but I'll maybe put that in the show notes,
along with other information about the various recording media I've been using or not,
yeah, media, recording media, this is relevant recording media, yeah, yeah, okay, so I think the next
one will be my last one, and it will just be these Bluetooth earbuds, if they work, we'll see,
I should be back in a second.
So this is the final and possibly the worst microphone back in the infusion,
sure, I don't know, sticking a pillow on top of a microphone, this is these are my own Bluetooth
earplugs, and technically Android doesn't let you record from them, you can use them for voice
rolls, okay, I'm just going to work mainly by accident, but recording apps generally don't let you
use them, so I filmed this weird app that is bizarre and forfeit, and it does let me record
an extra Bluetooth, something of an app, of course I like to do it, and interestingly,
we'll only let me record from it if I enabled calls on my Bluetooth headset, so it's somehow
cheating and treating this as a phone call, even though as far as I'm aware, and not for anyone,
but I hope I'm not for anyone, and I think a little bit of the some quality is very bad indeed,
now I should say that I do agree, in general, with the opinion that the some quality
does not matter that much in Hacker Public Radio, we're far more interested here in the content,
so as long as we can actually hear what you're saying, that's the most important thing, and if
the content is interesting then it's where they have the tail to the Hacker Public Radio, so
please do whatever type of recording device you have, however bad you might have
to do as long as you can use, please do record something for Hacker Public Radio, okay,
please, thank you, bye folks!
You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org,
today's show was contributed by an HBR listener like yourself,
if you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contribute link to find out
how easy it really is, hosting for HBR is kindly provided by an honesthost.com,
the internet archive, and our sync.net, unless otherwise stated, today's show is released
under a creative commons, attribution, share-like, fleet-as-o license.