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Comment by simonbarker87 | Hacker News Reader

Sound is much more important - even if you consider your podcast video first (in which case it’s not a podcast but that’s another topic) sound is more important. Take whatever smart phone you have and use that for the video and then spend any money you have for the camera and spend it on a decent mic.

People will watch lower quality video with good sound for far longer than they will watch good video with bad sound.

Source: listening to podcasts now for 15 years and grew my own to 5k listens a month across 100 episodes.

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I would even say that room treatment is a lot more valuable to a starting podcast. Sure don’t have the cheapest, shittiest mic but especially starting our room treatment grants a lot more value.

Of course, you could record in your closet ;)

Even easier: get a hypercardoid shotgun mic and speak directly into the front of it. I’ve had amazing success with the Azden SGM-250H in very poor recording environments (bare walls, tile floors, etc).

No affiliation, and I suspect numerous other similar mics would do well.

A hypercardioid and any manner of soft surface behind the speaker - even pillows or curtains - will get you >90% of the way there for most podcast purposes.

Really, after just fitting out a (very shoestring budget) recording studio, the first thing is reducing flutter echo by covering most hard flat parallel surfaces. That alone is like, worth double digit percent of the solution.

Second the room treatment. It should likely be prioritized over everything. Specifically you should look into getting bass traps and a gobo or three. There’s budget stuff out there but sound is fickle. Control those reflections. Expensive mics still sound bad if a room sounds bad.

> People will watch lower quality video with good sound for far longer than they will watch good video with bad sound.

Very true. I can stand bad/pixelated videos but crackling/distorted/unnormalized audio drives me crazy. Still many twitch channels seems not to know, or bother...

Exactly this. In terms of recording quality, my approach would look something like this:

1. Use a decent microphone.

2. Make sure you know how to handle the microphone.

3. Use closed-back headphones.

4. Record in a suitable environment/studio.

5. Consider adding a video track as well.

I wonder why there's still no AI tool that would take okay-ish voice recording and make it sound stellar, just like there are many tools for visual stuff?

AI tools can't make okay-ish video recordings suddenly look great.

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