That’s something I noticed a while ago: all podcasters have those huge microphones in front of them - sometimes with a gigantic boom - that wouldn’t look out of place on 1950s TV. But unlike in the 1950s, they’re not trying to hide them, no no: the more visible, the bigger, the better.
I can’t figure out the point of that prop. If I did a podcast, I’d try to unclutter the shot myself.
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It’s all about appearance. Studio equipment is expensive, so it looks more professional.
Large diaphragm condenser microphones are really good at getting a lot of detail in the sound from everything that happens in the room. They sound really great, more crisp and detailed than dynamic microphones.
However… Is that really what you want or need to capture people talking? That’s rhetorical. It’s not.
The best way to record a voice is actually to have a microphone near the mouth to get the closest you can get to the source of the sound. A smaller directional microphone can also be directed straight at the mouth so it doesn’t capture all kinds of noise from around the room.
A headset would make the most sense from an audio perspective, but then you look like a call center employee instead of a cOnTent CreatOr.
It solves a few problems podcasters have,
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ambiant noice; the typical “podcast/radio” microphones are designed to reject pretty much everything besides what is in front of them, and are very good at it (within limits you may not hear the hvac system but you’ll hear a door slam). The closer the microphone is the source(person), the less you have to turn up the volume. When you turn up a microphone’s volume, it’s going to turn up the volume of everything the microphone has captured; background noise, traffic, electrical interfernace, etc. The less you have turn up all the extra crap, the better the sound will be.
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multiple people in close promiximity. People sound different, one person might be soft spoken and the other might be loud. In order to hear the quiet person you need to crank their microphone up. If the two people shared a microphone, you’d have to find a balance between loud enough and too loud; ultimately that would lead to a viewer constantly having to adjust their volume depending on who’s speaking or paying an editor to do that.
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if the microphones are farther away, the loud person’s voice will get picked up by other people’s mic and will cause strange sounding effects from that person getting picked up by multiple microphones.
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consider the primary purpose of a podcast; people talking for a long period of time. Sound quality has to take priority. A news interview gets away with reduced sound quality because it’s for a short period of time, often less than a minute. But if they had us listening to that bad audio for an hour, most people would tune out.
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a lot of the problems I mentioned above could be fixed, or at least mitigated, with some audio editing before the episode is published. However, that doesn’t help a live podcast. It also takes a long time, a 1 hour podcast with bad audio could take a day to go through it all; you have to reduce the background noice, balance everyone’s audio, figure out how to make the softspoken person sound good without altering voice too while removing the background noise that’s sometimes just as loud as them. It’s even harder if eveyone is using 1 shared microphone, you end having to make edits everytime the speaker changes or accepting an infeiror product to save time. It’s a hell of alot easier(and cheaper) to just get sound quality right from the start. With that, you might only have spend a little time to make some minor adjustments.
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Studio mics tend to be big, it has its advantages. If your main medium is audio, a huge mic is not a problem.
Podcast is mainly an audio thing with video as an afterthought to reach more platforms.
I helped a guy set up his shot. He was adamount that his mic be visible in the shot. He just wanted it to look like other youtubers. That’s it. It’s a norm.
Yup. TV studios have even bigger mics but they just hang them on a big stick right above the shot.
Considering that it’s first and foremost an audio format it only makes sense to invest in a mic that produces the clearest sound. If a clip-on mic could achieve that then that’s what they’d use. They still use those massive camera rigs that move on wheels to film in studios too, where as one might think that any modern camera on a tripod would do the same thing - it wouldn’t.
Do you really believe you need a giant microphone to get clear sound in 2026? Someone should tell almost all TV news studios, because they all seem to produce perfect audio without a single microphone in sight.
Also, most podcasts are streamed, which is going to compress perfect audio into internet-friendly crap.
Condenser mics generally have a much larger diaphragm than dynamic mics. Closer to 1 inch in diameter.
They generally have a much greater sensitivity and can capture a lot more detail especially in the upper frequencies.
Another contributing factor is that there is more electronics housed in the microphone body and they require 48 volt power supply to operate. This voltage is often fed from the mixing console via the same cable that the audio from the mic is carried on. Often referred to as phantom power.
There are also versions that use vacuum tubes in that circuitry within the mic and you might even find dedicated power supplies. These preamp tubes can be an inch in diameter and roughly 3 inches tall, this also increases the physical size of the microphone.
And then you get to the point of marketing. Make something that resembles what professional studios use and the masses will buy it because it merely looks professional.
In pro audio it’s often said you can get 90 percent of the result for 10 percent of the cost. That last 10 percent will cost 90 percent.
In a bedroom podcast setup there enough issues with just the room usually to negate the 10 percent it takes to get to a pro level. In a studio purpose built hundreds of thousands have gone into making the rooms themselves optimal and that last 10 percent starts to matter a great deal more especially in terms of multi track recording with dozens of sources being miced and recorded to separate tracks. The noise of inferior equipment multiplied by those dozens of sources begins to add up into an audible problem.
I work in live TV. The podcast mike’s are tiny compared to the ones used in most TV work. A shotgun mic, with a windshield can be bigger than your forearm.
E.g. the Sannheiser MKE 600 is 20mm diameter and 256mm long (10"), without its windshield.
The lapel mics are both expensive as hell, and far lower quality. They are only used when a better mic can’t be.
The mics used by many podcasts are similar to those used by radio stations and music recording. They trade directionality for compactness, without dropping quality.
You know what’s a lot more expensive than a really big nice mic? The small shit real producers use.
Eh, that is highly dependant on the specific mics involved.
Quality size price. Pick 2 unless you want to be dropping a lot more money to get the best of all 3. Jesus Christ you people will argue anything.
Fair point lol!
When you can’t see a microphone the big boom mic is either out of frame (likely the case for tv news) or the sound isn’t from the recording itself
Bruh thinks the year has an affect on physics.
There is nothing to “believe”, it is documented fact that large microphones does tend to produce the clearest sound.
Your mistake is comparing TV, a visual audio medium, to podcasts, a mainly audio medium, and expecting the same needs.
This is wrong.
TV has to compromise the audio quallity with the visual aspect.
TV accepts getting 90% of the audio quallity as large mics would be too impractical, radio doesn’t have the visual limitations, and they use large membrane mics, same with podcasts.
I currently use a shotgun mic at home, mounted on a microphone arm, my setup is a Röde VideoMic Go II and a pair of Philips Fidelio X2HR headphones, it is brilliant for normal gaming/discord, the mic acts an audio interface that my headphones connects to as well and it is out of my way. But while the audio is excellent for gaming and would be find for podcasting guest apearences, for anything more demanding I would probably get a large membrane mic.
I may be an IT guy, but I am also a hobby photographer who finds AV tech fascinating.
I said clearest sound. Yes, Shure SM7B is widely considered to be among the best at that. If you’re producing an audio product then it makes zero sense to buy an inferior microphone just because it looks better. That’s entirely missing the point of the format.
A clip on mic + mixing is like 95% as good as a condenser mic with a pop filter but if you’re sitting down in a studio you may as well use a condernser mic with a pop filter so you can get good quality sound.
Totally this. In my experience, the smaller mics are also more expensive. I got a pretty insane studio condenser for like 40 eurobucks.
You need a good combuster and equalizer to surpress grab . I always opt for the bigger mic, it also hides the teenage pimples
Movies and TV shows sometimes (more often than you’d think) have to re-record the speech, effectively dub over themselves, because the audio from the live shoot isn’t usable for one reason or another. And of course, almost all sound effects are foley and recorded in a studio with those giant microphones too.
But you’re not wrong, boom mics and smaller mics can be really effective. But it takes a lot more effort both during recording and afterwards in post production to achieve the same level of audio clarity. For podcasts it’s not worth the extra effort because they don’t mind the giant mic being in the shot.
Because they sound better.
Basically every podcast on the planet opts for 1 of 2 microphone choices, both of which are industry standard in radio.
They both offer excellent audio quality for ~$500.
When your working in an audio medium, people will notice if your audio quality is sub-par a lot faster than if your video is sub-par in a visual one.
it’s pretty difficult to capture human voices accurately while rejecting ambient noise, and a larger diaphragm and its supporting components need larger housing than a mic that isn’t as particular.
techzone audio makes their mics by hand and has good informational videos showing the internal components; you can see there’s not a ton of empty space inside their mics, and the diameter itself is determined by the internal housing and necessary components.
That used to be true with the tecnological limitations of analogue and early digital systems. Now these functions are processed digitally. You can get excellent microphones that do not need to appear on camera at all.
It’s mostly for show and the popularity of the medium has built a market who want to look the part of serious people and wanting to evoke the image of the trusted old timers on the news, for one example, is part of the image.
Hard disagree. There’s a reason pro equipment still exists. Digital noise suppression is still noticeable in comparison to analog. It’s always better to start with a higher quality analog source and do the least amount of digital processing after.
Now, this is with the caveat that someone in an already isolated room with good acoustics can get away with a much cheaper microphone sounding comparable, but give some reflective surfaces in a room and make it non-symmetrical and now the advantage starts to amplify for good source audio.
Source: I’ve done audio production for a few stage plays and produced an album.
Got a degree in audio engineering. Otacon239 knows what they’re talking about.
audio is usually processed digitally; these XLR mics all filter their input through a preamp, but a digital process won’t directly capture audio the same way a physical diaphragm in an XLR mic will, which is what the podcast microphones OP is asking about use.
companies can produce smaller microphones and a lot of people use smaller microphones that capture and process audio differently then XLR mics, but if you’re curious about why podcast microphones specifically are physically larger than other mics, it comes down to the function of a microphone diaphragm designed for the human vocal range and its supporting components shown in the video linked above.
A large microphone is the difference between a serious podcaster, and some guy talking.
That was quite amusing 🙂
To be honest, there is some truth in this too! Perhaps it’s even the main reason. But the technical reasons still exist
Going for the radio show look
Early on in podcasting/vidcasting, you had two things going on. People coming from a professional media background (Leo Laporte, Adam Curry, etc.) who either had access to the high end broadcast equipment or bought what they knew. And then you had new podcasters who were on a near zero budget. Big mics had a lot more range for the money. It became symbolic even as equipment got smaller and cheaper. It became a sign that you’re serious and legitimate.
Adam Curry, now there’s a name I have not seen in a long time.
I watched his show on Europa TV, then MP3s appeared and he jumped on it. He was one of the first (of not the first) podcaster. I think he was the one who came up with the name.
Good times.
I assume that larger size could be less sensitive for when the speaker repositions themselves. Imagine sitting still for two hours while talking about topics that steer up some emotions. It’s just more natural to move a bit.
(I have no idea, I just assume that bigger microphones help with that)
If you’re really moving a lot and don’t/can’t move the boom with your facehole, I think you’d be better off with a lapel (small clip on) mic. While it’s true that you will always be heard, you lose depth in the voice fast if you move away from even the larger mic’s. I used a large condenser mic for a while during gaming, but I move and reposition a lot, more then I like to adjust the boom. So now I use an Antlion ModMic that clips on my headphones.
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They don’t know what to do with their hands while they speak
They usually don’t have anything interesting or meaningful to say, so they gotta have the big mic to at least give the illusion that they do? If they’re boring/insipid/uninspired, at least they have good equipment?
LOL, yesterday I saw one I think it was Piker was being interviewed, and had this gigantic microphone in front of him and ever few seconds adjusting it’s position, then you could see a tiny microphone on his shirt the same one the host was using.
I found it hilarious.
I guess in podcast space it looks like the bigger microphone you have the bigger deal you are.
You have nonidea which mic was being used.
It is quite possible that they have done a video before and went straight into a podcast studio
Could also just be a backup mic. It’s not uncommon for a mic or pc to fuck up the recording halfway through the recording, so having a backup of any kind, is better than having nothing.
Certainly!
Overcompensation.
