Thanks for posting this, Peter! Over at TidBITS, we record all of our articles as podcasts, and because I listen to so many podcasts, I’m picky about quality. I asked around for mic recommendations, and the Blue Yeti was mentioned again and again. I decided to splurge, and it is a great microphone. Also, I bought a copy of Audio Hijack Pro, but didn’t realize it had a noise gate, so I need to investigate that further.

An Apogee MiC is $199, has an onboard gain control and level light, and “just works” with iPads, iPhones, and Macs. With a Mac you get 24-bit recording. If you are doing anything remotely musical, this is definitely the all-in-one USB MiC to get. But it just captures great-sounding recordings of voices and is ridiculously easy to use. Also very rugged.

I disagree wholeheartedly with the author’s dynamic versus condenser ideas. The reason broadcast radio standardized on dynamics is because both radio broadcasts and dynamic mics are missing the top 25–50% of the frequencies that humans can hear. There was no reason to go to the expense of using condensers (which require AC power or batteries) to capture audio frequencies that could not even be broadcast over AM or FM. However, podcasts are not like AM/FM, they are like CD. Your listener has 20–20,000 Hz soundscape and so do condenser microphones and so do human ears. Even if you are crushing your MP4 audio down for network delivery, even at only 64 kbits AAC still has the full 20–20,000 Hz soundscape. And in the future you will crush the audio less and be glad those frequencies are in your recording. So you should be recording with a condenser to capture your full voice. Audio processing is very much Garbage In Garbage Out. A high-fidelity, full-frequency recording is the main priority.