[hajile]

I’ve never understood this issue. We get paid well. A $400-450 Shure sm7b or Electrovoice re20 will last you decades and is an incredible return on investment — way better than your electronics and monitor investments and probably better than your chair and desk investments for most people.

Even a $30-50 USB mic will last a few years and blow away your laptop or built-in camera mic (though the dynamic Shure/EV mics don’t pick up everything like capacitive mics).

[jacamera]

For me at least it's about the ergonomics of the microphone form factor. I'm not comfortable with a standalone mic in front of my face. I don't like having to remember to keep the proper distance.

I got a nice high quality broadcast headset that sounded amazing but then I couldn't get the monitoring levels to work well with any combination of audio interfaces. On any given call I might have to boost my headphone volume considerably depending on the other person's audio quality but that would invariably throw off my own monitoring levels.

In the end I got a high quality gaming headset that doesn't require monitoring due to the open-back design. The microphone sounds fine but not nearly as good as the other options unfortunately.

All that to say I spent a few thousand dollars over a few months trying to solve this problem and couldn't find a great solution!

[hajile]

ElectroVoice re20. The "variable-D" design helps you sound decent if you're not keeping exact distance from the mic. The builtin pop blocker is also quite effective.

It was designed so that if your interview target didn't have good mic discipline (most people don't have any), you'd still get a usable recording. As long as you're in a roughly 12" cube in front of the mic, you'll basically be fine.

If you're spending that much money and really want a headset mic, get a countryman and wireless set. You only need to reach a few feet, so a cheap analog system should work perfectly and provide way better sound quality.

[coffeebeqn]

Anything is better than a laptop mic. It’s amazing how some people don’t seem to get the hint after years of remote. I bought a $30 Razer desktop mic and it’s already and order of magnitude better and pretty sturdy compared to the $10 lapel mics or laptop mics

[s4i]

> Anything is better than a laptop mic.

This is not true if you have a fairly recent Apple MacBook. The mic quality especially on the Pro models from the last few years is actually pretty good. I often ask people to switch to that mic in our Google Meets if they are using almost any bluetooth headphones (even high end Bose or Sony ones).

[coffeebeqn]

The M-series? My company doesn’t have those so I can’t attest.

My Bose Bluetooth headphones are great except the mic. I think it’s optimized for noise cancellation so it kind of sucks for voice - and for some reason forces noise cancellation to high when using the mic so it’s feels really weird in my ears - even other peoples voices become more tinny somehow

[dr_kiszonka]

By the way, is there any easy to use software to make your voice sound better, e.g., crisper or slightly lower, during Zoom/Teams calls? I don't know enough about audio to change equalizer values to something that would sound good.

(I already have a stand-alone mic.)