This is the show for creative entrepreneurs who have a message to share and want to live a life of freedom. Learn how to grow your network and net worth. Hear from exciting guests and more. My name is Dylan Schmidt and Welcome to Digital Podcaster. Today we're going to be talking about sound quality, sound quality is vitally important to a podcast success. It's not the make or break, people will sit through bad audio. So I will say that there is a lot of snobs out there. If you're watching this on YouTube or listening to me on YouTube, there'll be no shortage of sound snobs sound snobs, that's what I'm going to call you, if you are a sound stuff. But it is important, I get that. And I don't want to downplay the importance of sound quality. But that is, you know, and I'm talking like good enough sound quality is second to the content, right? It doesn't matter how great your sound quality is, if the subject you're talking about is one, not interesting to anybody except yourself. If it's very like self serving, then it doesn't matter if you have the perfect sound quality to if no one hears what you're recording, like, if you're not doing the right promotional strategies in place, then the sound quality isn't going to promote your podcast for you. When rode the popular podcasting gear company released a recent road caster to I made a tweet about you know, unfortunately, you know, bad news for podcasters the road caster to is not going to make you're not going to grow your podcast, something like that. Because the truth is, doesn't matter. If you spend $1,000, on a microphone $1,000 on anything, or $50,000 or $100,000, it's not gonna make your message better, it might make it sound better, but if no one's listening, who cares? So let's talk about some ways that you can make sound quality better for you. And honestly, this is what I do my like, my number one trick for this stuff is, well, if you didn't know, my background is audio production, audio engineering. That's what I went to school for right out of high school. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to work in a recording studio, I wanted to, you know, work with bands. I wanted to live that rock and roll lifestyle. Not really. But I would witness some of that. So what can you do right? Sound Quality? There is a graph if there was a graph, and I know this is a podcast episode. So visualize with me for a moment, if there was a graph, on one side, there was, you know, price. And another side was sound quality, improving the sound quality, you would have to spend way more to get great sound quality, right? Because you would if from if you're following what I recommend, like I like video for podcasts, because it makes it easier to grow the podcast. So I do like a somewhat of a visual aesthetic on some level for your podcast. It would cost more money to make it look great, right? If you went in your closet, and you use that as your soundproofing awesome, but it's not gonna look that good. Let's be honest, it's not. I don't know, anybody who's made a closet aesthetic look good. And so it would, you know, take some money to soundproof room and make all these things but what can you do? So the easiest solution is having the right microphone. There are certain microphones like the Blue Yeti, for example, that's not going to make, you know, you need a really good control over your room, if you're going to make a podcast with a Blue Yeti microphone, for example. But this is the Shure SM seven B. There's the Shure envy seven, the Shure SM seven B is a dynamic microphone, it's not picking up noise outside, like here's a sound example. Like if I took away from it over here, if that if that was a Blue Yeti, you would hear more of it right. And there's a lot of settings on the Blue Yeti, you can tweak I'm not picking on the Blue Yeti, it's just a popular podcast, what people buy, and then they usually buy a second one when they realize the Blue Yeti didn't do what they wanted it to do. And how long that takes people to figure out all depends. You know, some people are like, they realized very quickly, this is not the sound quality I wanted out of this thing. It just looks cool. So you could get yourself something like a Shure MV seven, which is going to pick up less room noise, then a Blue Yeti. But there's other things like, you know, what can you control also, you can control the walls around you in the room. If there's not a lot of stuff in a room, if you had an empty room, the sound is going to be bouncing around right? It's going to sound you know the sound of like an empty room. If you have a more full room with things on the walls and things like that, the sound will be absorbed through the objects. So if you and you know this is is the part where the rabbit hole can go deep if you let it, which I don't recommend you do. But I recommend you have the proper microphone and just be mindful of the room you're in, right? Because I put the importance on content on on the message that you want to convey to your audience on a little bit, a little bit of the aesthetic don't like the video. Sound quality is, again, vitally important, but it shouldn't dictate like, I need to every time I record, I need something up against the wall. Probably not like that's probably wasted time. Do people notice that? Can you fix it digitally afterwards with something like a phonic? Probably. So I don't want you to put so much emphasis on sound quality that you lose sight of the mission of your podcast, which is to publish a podcast, which is to grow it, which is to build an audience, which is the share message. That is, you know, that's that's, that's the end goal. And there's a lot of podcasts out there. Whether they repurpose content from less ideal scenarios, like live events or something like that, that are highly successful that, you know, they don't have the perfect conditions. So you I just want you to know that sound quality doesn't dictate your success. Getting over imposter syndrome. Learning about your audience delivering a valuable podcast is how you create success with a podcast. It's not through achieving Sonic fidelity. Unless that is what your podcast is about is Sonic fidelity, then you wouldn't even be probably listening to this far at that point. Because your whole basis of doing something would be on sound quality. So it can seem a little intimidating or challenging because you are trying to find the key to the best sound. You're also listening through it through a constructive ear. Most of the time, I will say this, very rarely do I come across podcasts that are so bad, I'd go like this is absolutely terrible. If you have listened to this far of the episode, you're you already know more than like 99% of people that don't put any effort into this. And that will show your awareness now we'll then convey into your own sound quality. So I kind of want you to stop worrying about it a little bit and just be mindful of like what objects are in my room. What microphone Am I using? Is it like something like? Is the microphone picking up other noises? Can I control those noises? Can I close a couple extra doors so I don't hear the noise from other people in the house. So control what you can control. But at the end of the day, it's okay. Like we're all you know human beings, there's imperfections and embracing those imperfections can be a strength. So don't let sound quality hold you back from pressing publish is what I will say about that. In the next episode, we're going to talk about editing because I know editing can be it's actually kind of related to sound quality in some ways because you can edit out imperfections in audio and we'll talk about that. You know, spoiler alert, you will find some of the things I say about editing. Similar to sound quality of like, you gotta let go. It's a process of letting go. But you do want to edit certain things out and we'll talk about that in the next episode. I hope you have been enjoying the podcast. If there's anything you'd like me to go deeper on on sound quality, please let me know. And that is all I got for you today. I will talk to you soon and I'll see you in the next episode about editing. Have a great day.