The $100 podcast upgrade

As the more astute among you have certainly noticed, the vocal interludes during my most recent episodes of Radio Free Hipster have been – not to put too fine a point on it – shitty. This is due squarely to the fact that the microphone (and I use the term loosely) that I have come to rely on has seen better days.

Thankfully, I recently finagled a solitary c-note with which to improve my meager circumstance.

Thanks to some creative purchasing through that old standby of cheap-ass audiophiles Musician’s Friend, I was able to get pretty much everything I needed.

Now, I know there are those among you who will take this opportunity to say, “Z., that’s all well and good, but you really should’ve taken this opportunity to get a condenser mic/higher quality mixer/shinier pop filter/other shit that is obviously better than the stuff you settled for, and I should know because I'm way smarter than you.”

To those folks, for whom I hold the utmost of respect tempered with the mildest of fury, I would like to point out that this was my existing “podcasting rig” in its entirety:

This, however, is my new set-up:

Now I must ask, would any among you say that the latter is not, at the very least, a marginal improvement over the former?

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That’s what I thought.

Now, hopefully, I’ll be able to figure out how the hell to use this gear before my next podcast. Y’all wish me luck.