About microphones
I've been looking at podcasting recently, as a way to publish my Victor Xray material and related research for the Clan Analogue label (I had to take the older Nerve Agent stuff off line because of extensive and server-swamping file leeching from China-based IP addresses).
Anyway, I subscribed to the podcasters yahoogroup, because I was interested in learning about the tools I could use for podcasting (specifically the server and client tools). The blog I use, Pebble, will most likely support RSS 'enclosures' (the heart of podcasting) in the next version 1.6.1. In the meantime there's some research to be done. Anyway It struck me the number of questions people ask on the list, not about the actually blogging/podcasting tools but about the basic processes of recording and editing audio. My anecdotal research suggested the topic of microphones comes up quite frequently, I guess I decided to share my experience with microphones and similar material by posting an introductory primer about microphones to the list.
In order to share this text a bit wider and archive it for the web, I present here my microphone primer, aimed primarily for the person looking to get into podcasting but otherwise generally useful. I'm going to address this from the point of view of someone who wants 'quality on a budget'.