I recorded this one on a USB mic at a hotel desk, next to a kettle and some UHT milk I’m going to regret. If you can’t hear much difference, that’s the whole episode.

There’s a quality floor in podcasting. Below it, people leave. Above it, something odd happens: nobody notices anything at all. Nobody has ever finished an episode, turned to their partner and said “lovely compression on that one.”

Most of us got over that floor years ago, thanks to Descript’s Studio Sound, Adobe’s free Enhance Speech button and Auphonic. Nobody told you. So we keep buying things our listeners can’t hear.

In this episode:

• The same hotel-room recording played twice, raw and cleaned up (try it in one earbud)
• Why I stopped swearing by iZotope RX 11
• Dennis, his vintage biscuit tin podcast, and the gear spiral that took the paint off his wall
• The £300 metal box still sitting in my loft
• Why February me was only half right about one-click audio tools
• The wardrobe test: a free check to do before you buy anything else

Chapters:

00:00 The same recording, played twice

02:24 The quality floor (and when you got over it)

05:23 Dennis, the biscuit tins and my £300 box in the loft

07:39 February me was half right

10:31 What actually makes a difference

11:28 Your one thing: the wardrobe test

Links:

The Podmastery community founding-members waitlist: podmastery.co/podcasting-community

Got a problem that’s bigger than your sound? podmastery.co/need-podcasting-help

Auphonic (free for 2 hours a month): auphonic.com

The February episode I mention, When Tools Make Bad Audio Sound ‘Good’, Who Loses?: https://podmastery.co/episodes/when-tools-make-bad-audio-sound-good-who-loses/

Descript (affiliate link: you get a bargain, I get a kickback, that’s how this works):

I'm in a hotel room and I haven't unpacked yet,

and to the left of me there's a kettle, couple of sachets of coffee

and a couple of cartons of UHT milk.

I already know that.

I'm gonna regret. On the wall,

just over there, there's a painting of, like...

I don't even know what it is.

It looks like someone's just splashed paint at the canvas.

Nobody in the entire history of this hotel room has ever looked at that on purpose.

I'm in a hotel room and I haven't unpacked yet, and to the left of me there's

a kettle, couple of sachets of coffee and a couple of cartons of UHT milk.

I already know that.

I'm gonna regret. On the wall, just over there, there's a painting of, like...

I don't even know what it is.

It looks like someone's just splashed paint at the canvas.

Nobody in the entire history of this hotel room has ever looked at that on purpose.

That's the same recording played to you twice.

The first one is the hotel room exactly as it comes.

The second is that same audio after I'd run it through a tool that I use,

which took about as long as boiling that kettle that I was just telling you about.

If you're listening in one earbud while you're doing something else, you might

be struggling to tell the difference.

Hang on to that because it's gonna be most of this episode.

Welcome along to Podmastery Podcasting Insights, the podcast for indie

creators that helps you get more from your podcasting efforts on your

journey towards attaining Podmastery.

I'm Neal Veglio, the Podmaster, and for this episode, I'm coming to

you from a hotel room on a hotel desk using a USB microphone, which

is not exactly how I pictured my audio career going, but here we are.

And in this episode I'm gonna explain why the next thing you buy

for your podcast almost certainly won't make it sound any better.

Now look, there's a quality floor in podcasting.

Below it, people ditch out.

You've heard those shows recorded in what sounds like a multi-storey car park.

The host at the far end of a kitchen from the laptop's inbuilt microphone

and somebody's tumble dryer having a breakdown in the background.

You last about 40 seconds on those episodes, and then you never go

back. Above the quality floor,

something odd happens.

Nobody notices anything.

Nobody has ever finished an episode, turned to their partner and said,

"Lovely compression on that one."

Nobody's ever left a five-star review that says the low end was very well managed.

Once you're over that quality line, the sound stops being a reason

to stay or a reason to leave.

It just disappears.

And most of us got over that line years ago, but nobody told you.

Brief history of audio treatment in recording tools.

Descript had Studio Sound running outta beta in 2021.

I'm a Descript affiliate, by the way.

The link is in the episode description.

You will get a bargain.

I will get a kickback.

That's how this works.

In December 2022, Adobe stuck a speech cleaning button on the

internet, again in beta, for free.

And Auphonic, which is what you heard at the beginning of this episode,

will do two hours a month for nothing.

So by the end of 2022, if you had a halfway decent USB mic and a laptop,

you are kind of over the floor.

And since then, for probably most people that will hear this episode, every upgrade

has been buying something your listeners can't even hear. Up until probably six

months ago, I swore by a very expensive professional tool called iZotope RX.

And I got as far as RX 11 with it, and I realised very quickly...

We pause for construction work going on outside the hotel, which you

probably can't even hear because by this point I've run this through

Auphonic. But back to my main point.

It got to the stage where even after using iZotope RX 11 painstakingly on

audio and having that nice feeling of superiority, audio engineering bliss,

I quickly realised that the difference between the results that I was getting

from this professional grade, studio grade, broadcast grade audio engineering

tool was not really noticeable when compared with something like Auphonic.

Let me tell you about Dennis.

Let's imagine Dennis.

Dennis does a podcast about vintage biscuit tins from the box room

of a semi-detached in Norfolk.

He knows more about Huntley & Palmers than anybody should really be allowed to.

Dennis started with a USB mic and it was all fine.

Then he watched a video of an audio engineering bro, and after

that he bought a better mic.

The better mic needed an interface.

The interface needed a cable.

The cable that came was a cheap cable that kept breaking,

so he bought a better cable.

Then he bought a boom arm because the man in the video had bought a

boom arm, and then foam panels stuck to the wall with something that

when he eventually took them down, unfortunately took the paint with them.

His listeners noticed none of it.

His listeners were on one AirPod walking a Labrador along the front at Great

Yarmouth into a wind you could lean on.

What they would've noticed would've been a better story

about the 1953 coronation tin.

And before you think that I'm sat here on my hotel desk sneering at Dennis,

I once bought an outboard compressor, a physical one, a metal box with knobs

on it that sits between the microphone and the computer glowing slightly like

it knows something that you don't.

And I bought it because I thought it would make my podcasts sound better.

The dbx 286s is still in my loft somewhere.

It cost me about £300 brand new.

Did it make my podcast sound different?

Well, yeah, certainly to me, in my headphones. Did one single

listener notice and go, "Cor blimey, Neal, your podcast sounds so

much better than everybody else's"?

You already know the answer to that.

And the funniest part about all this was it wasn't that great, and RØDE then

added pretty much the same software to the RØDECaster Pro anyway.

And the rest is history.

God bless my third RØDECaster Pro II sitting in my bag behind me.

Now I have to own something because some of you have been listening

long enough to catch me out.

Back in February, I did an episode called When Tools Make

Bad Audio Sound 'Good', Who Loses?

And I was pretty perturbed in it and I was a bit cross in it.

I'd spent years learning how to do all this properly and there was a button

taking a decent stab at it all for free.

And I asked whether it was fair that somebody on their phone with no

preparation could sound the same as somebody who'd actually put the work in.

So here is the answer from a hotel bed. February

me was half right.

The tools did flatten something out.

They flattened out the difference between a cheap microphone and an expensive one.

Now, if you sell expensive microphones, that's gonna be a tragedy.

If you make a podcast, it's the best thing that's happened to you in years.

What they couldn't do anything about is the room that you sit in or what comes

outta your mouth once you are sat in it.

Which brings me to the take that I didn't play you at the beginning of this episode.

I'm in a hotel room and I haven't unpacked yet, and to the left of

me there's a kettle and a bunch of coffee and sachets of UHT milk.

Hmm.

Lovely.

That's pretty much the same passage on the same microphone, held

the same distance from my face and nothing's been done to it.

All I did was move two feet to my left, to the wardrobe.

All that cost me was getting off the chair.

The software's very good and I'll keep using it, but moving was

free and it did kind of bring a bit more presence to the audio.

There was a little bit more echo off the size of the wardrobe, to be fair,

which you can easily take out with the Auphonic tool anyway, right?

Honest result, then: the tool won.

Moving helped, but Auphonic helped more, which is kind of my point if I'm honest.

Getting over that quality floor has been free since 2022 or

at least considerably cheaper.

move, process, then stop fiddling with equipment.

And I should own up to one thing that's been doing a lot

of the heavy lifting here.

This is a dynamic microphone, and dynamics

don't pick up as much of the room, which is why this

hotel's getting off so lightly.

If this was a Blue Yeti and I wasn't using it correctly, you would definitely

hear the difference, trust me on that.

But that's the only piece of kit advice that you're gonna

get from me on this episode.

And if you've already got a dynamic USB plug-in, congratulations,

you have just finished shopping.

So what does make a difference,

then, once you are over that quality line? Two things, and nobody

can sell you either of them.

First of all, the room, which you can fix with a duvet, and whatever comes outta your

whether you've actually got a point and whether you stop once you've made it.

Nobody has ever stopped listening to a podcast because the

compression was a bit lumpy.

They stop because they're disengaged, they're bored, and

I've never seen a microphone

that fixes boring.

I've looked, I've looked at a frankly embarrassing number of microphones,

and not one of them says that it has an anti-boring filter built in.

Lots of them do have pop shields.

After this short break, I'd love to play your podcast from one of

our Podmastery community members.

We're gonna be opening the doors to the public soon.

If you'd like to join the founding members, head to

podmastery.co/podcasting-community and get yourself on the waiting list.

Nice one.

So here's your one thing you need to do, your actionable thing that you need

to do after listening to this episode, before you buy the next thing, and

there's always gonna be a next thing.

There's a man on YouTube holding it up right now, slightly too close

to the lens with a beaming smile.

Do the wardrobe test. Record 30 seconds where you normally sit.

Then 30 seconds standing in a full wardrobe with the coats

around your ears, same words, same distance from the microphone.

Play both back on your phone, because that's probably what a

lot of your listeners are using.

If the wardrobe wins out, then put the credit card down and go and find a duvet.

It'll cost you a bit of dignity and nothing else.

If it doesn't, run it through Auphonic, and if you're still convinced it's

the microphone after that, come and talk to me before you spend anything.

If you're listening and you're thinking, "But I don't have an issue with wanting

to improve my sound, Neal, my issues are way deeper than..." Pop to podmastery.co

and get in touch with me.

I can help.

I'm Neal Veglio, the Podmaster, podcasting from a hotel room in this

episode, which I'd be grateful if you kept to yourself on this occasion.

Thanks for listening, and until the next episode, good luck with your continuing

journey towards attaining Podmastery.