Best Podcast Recording Setup for Remote Interviews
What to use, what to skip, and the one setting that matters more than any piece of equipment you buy.
Remote interviews are now most podcasts' default format. The gap between a good remote recording and a bad one is mostly decisions, not money.
The setting that matters most
Record locally, not over the call. Riverside, Zencastr and SquadCast record each participant's audio on their own machine at full quality and upload it afterwards. A Zoom recording captures the compressed, dropout-prone version that survived the internet.
This one choice affects quality more than any microphone either of you buys.
Microphones
A dynamic USB microphone — a Shure MV7, an ATR2100 — is the sensible default for a spare room. Dynamic microphones reject room sound far better than condensers, which matters enormously when neither of you has an acoustically treated space.
Send one to important guests. It costs less than re-recording an episode.
Headphones
Non-negotiable for both parties. Without them, each person's speakers feed back into their microphone, and that echo cannot be removed cleanly afterwards.
The room
Soft surfaces beat expensive equipment. A room with a carpet, curtains and a sofa will out-record a bare office with a better microphone every time. A wardrobe genuinely works.
Before you hit record
- Separate tracks per speaker: on
- Headphones: on both ends
- A test recording of thirty seconds, listened back to
- Phones on silent, notifications off, windows closed
What to skip
Mixers, interfaces and audio processing on the way in. Anything that processes the signal before it is recorded is a decision you cannot undo. Record it clean and let post handle it.