Best Podcast Microphones for Less than $100

David Jackson  0:04  
All right, welcome to episode number three of best podcasting gear. I'm your host, Dave Jackson from the School of podcasting.com. And one of the things I want to be sure to talk about here is you don't have to spend $2,000 on equipment to sound good. Case in point today we have three microphones that are less than $100 in Wait till you hear what they sound like. Here we go.

 All right now let's pull back the curtain. Microphone number one is the Samsung cue to you what's interesting is that microphone goes for $49 and it comes with a pair of headphones.

Now granted the hair for the headphones are not great, but you can't beat the price. And from what I understand these three microphones are very similar inside basically the same guts. So microphone number one, Samsung Q two you microphone number two, audio technica AT 2005. This goes for $63 and for the record, probably the best looking of the three and microphone number three is the Audio Technica ATR 2100 goes for $79 Now here's my opinion. I thought the Audio Technica sounded the best I liked. I was surprised the 2005 Didn't it sounded a little dead to me. I thought the cue to you almost had a little too much bass. But the ATR 2100 had a decent amount of bass and seemed to have a little more high end. And those were all plugged directly into a recorder with me basically with my mouth in front of a mic stand, holding it in the same spot and I've done zero processing on that file. Now here's the other thing you're going to notice. If you're listening to the sound of the car, you're probably going Wait Can you play that? Again, I didn't really hear any difference. And that is really a key point. There's really not a whole lot of difference in those. And I believe the ATR 2100 has a lifetime warranty. The other ones don't. But the point is, you don't have to spend $400 on a microphone, you don't have to spend $300 You can really I know a lot of people use the ATR 2100 I use it when I do Skype. Right now I'm talking into an electro voice re 320 and in next week's episode, we'll put the RV 320 against the high LPR 40 and an audio technica BP 40. Just to show you microphones in the $300 range, but like I said, if you're on a limited budget, these will do fine. In fact, I'll point out next week that maybe that'll be the week after that we'll compare what I think is the best sounding microphone to $100 microphone and then the best sounding $300 microphone and we'll put the two against each other and see if it sounds a whole lot different. Now if you're interested in buying one of these microphones, help support the show go to Best podcasting gear.com/shop And that is our Amazon store there and you can check the prices on all of these. So thanks so much for tuning in. We'll see you again real soon with another episode of Best podcasting.