NOTE, YOU’LL NEED THE MIC, ALSO THE RECOMMENDED MIC STAND AND FOAM WINDSCREENS LINKED BELOW. GET ALL THREE. IT’S PART OF A SYSTEM THAT WORKS GREAT TOGETHER.

I can fully recommend this mic: Samson Q2U Handheld Dynamic USB Microphone with Headphones and Accessories. It’s a quality mic, and comes with some headphones that will work fine for talk radio.

It’s a solid mic. It has a great sound, great pickup pattern, good rejection of off-mic noise, has a headphone jack in the mic for latency-free monitoring, and all in all, is perfect for low-budget spoken audio. I’ve tested hundreds of mics, and again and again I’ve returned to recommending this mic to people who want to start sharing their voice with the world.

You need to have the mic close to your mouth, like between 2 and 4 inches. And turn off  all background noise, fans, AC, etc. before you go live.

You’ll also need a mic stand, get this one. and some foam windscreens, get these.

I actually like a few things better about the Samson mic than the other mic I used to recommend. For one, the volume control is on the bottom side of the mic, not on the bottom end, it’s easier to get to. And the indicator LED light actually turns red if you’re distorting (not that it’s easy to see while using the mic, especially with a windscreen on). I did not like the internal foam inside the grill, it smelled funky, like petrol, like most things shipped on a slow boat from China these days. I unscrewed the grill, pulled that foam out, threw it away, and just relied on an add-on foam windscreen.

What a time to be alive when the price of the gear for getting on worldwide radio is 44 bucks. Things sure have changed since I was a kid, and I’m digging getting to go along for the ride. And I’m glad to have helped in the from of co-developing FeenPhone. Check it out, FeenPhone is free, and is much better than Skype for connecting remote spoken media producers over the miles.

Michael W. Dean uses the mic for the first segment of this Freedom Feens show here, with MWD calling in over FeenPhone.

DO NOT GET THE YETI MIC. They suck and cost more. If you get the Yeti instead of this mic, you are literally Hitler.

–MWD