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Comment by extr | Hacker News Reader

It's not just good, I found it to be way better than a standalone shotgun mic connected via USB. I researched this for WFH and found a lot of people saying you were going to spend hundreds to replicate the quality in a more "professional" mic setup. Super impressive.

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Does it record a fixed point, or does it do something fancy like using the camera to attempt tracking the user's movement? Just curious, and I don't have access to a modern Mac. The article seems to imply that it's focusing on a fixed point.

No idea, I believe it's just a fixed point. Personally I use it while sitting in front of my Mac about 1-2 feet from my face. I've done tests, it's better than every other form of audio input I have available, including standalone shotgun mic, Airpods Max, Airpods Pro V2, etc.

As someone looking to replicate it from a pro mic setup, what do people recommend?

I've been trying to record audio in my noisy server room but only deepfilternet is able to deal with the fan noise in the background.

Biggest thing is you need a nice mic that's very close to your face, like you might see on a twitch stream. Good noise isolation via a directional mic off-camera is quite difficult/expensive apparently.

I bought a røde wireless mic which definitely helped. It gives deepfilternet enough good signal:noise to work reasonably well, but I was hoping there was an even better solution.

A lot of dialogue in movies is dubbed for this very reason, it’s very hard to not pick up noise. What you can deal with is how close the mic is to you (which is why news reporters rely on hand held mics, not just the boom mike) and the pattern of the mic: a cardoid, hypercardoid or shotgun mic facing the opposite direction of the noise source would pick up less than an omnidirectional one (which is why the mics you see in studios are not used on a loud stage—not only are they fragile and expensive, they also tend to be omnidirectional).

There's definitely an ADR (dubbing) component to movies, but it's not very much these days. (In comparison to decades ago.)

Instead, sound engineers spend weeks cleaning up spoken dialog by hand in spectrogram editors. It's honestly astounding the magic they can do, but it's also labor-intensive and therefore expensive. They're literally individually EQ-ing every vowel, splicing consonants from one word to another... it's wild.

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