Voice Recorder

The room matters more than the microphone

People who want better recordings almost always start by buying a microphone, and almost always should have started with the room. A microphone captures the direct sound of your voice and, in equal measure, every reflection of it bouncing off hard walls, windows, desks and ceilings — and it is those reflections that make a recording sound hollow, distant and amateurish. An expensive microphone in a bare, echoing room produces a high-fidelity recording of a bad-sounding space. A modest microphone in a room with a carpet, curtains, a sofa and some bookshelves sounds dramatically better, because the soft surfaces are absorbing the reflections before they arrive. This is why professional voice recording happens in rooms lined with soft material, and why recording in a clothes-filled wardrobe genuinely works.

Fix it at the source, not in the edit

There is an old rule in audio: you cannot fix in post what you broke in the take, and it is truer of recording than of almost anything else. Noise reduction software can suppress a steady background hum, but it does so by removing frequency content, and it takes some of your voice with it — heavy noise reduction leaves a characteristic watery, processed artefact that is immediately audible and impossible to undo. Clipping, where the signal was recorded too loud and the peaks were squared off, is simply unrecoverable; the information is gone. Five minutes spent closing a window, turning off a fan, moving away from a humming fridge and setting the input level so peaks land comfortably short of maximum will do more for the final recording than any amount of processing afterwards.