Hello, would love to learn more about what hardware you are using. I am in the market for a high quality condenser mic and arm to hold it. I am already using a Scarlett Solo interface. But would appreciate any info you can share on your light and audio setup. Also why do you need multiple elgatos? Just for convenience?
What is your use case? There is really no need for a high-quality condenser mic in the vast majority of cases. For work meetings, voice chats, streaming, etc. the difference between an AT2020 and a high-quality mic will be entirely imperceptible.
Yes, that's pretty much my point. The commenter above asked for a high-quality condenser specifically. I doubt they want a U 87, so it's probably better to ask a different question (e.g. "what's the best condenser for the money?").
The difference between those dollar store air pods and any condenser on the first page of Amazon search results for "condenser mic" is going to be huge, but past like $50-100 nobody will be able to notice a difference over voice chat.
Or the dollar store microphones that my rich tech company employer insists on putting in meeting rooms.
I spent a little bit of my own money to make my home video setup as nice as possible. It's frustrating that coworkers are now returning to the office and the meeting room video/audio quality is still pure garbage.
We are looking to do desktop game streaming. I currently have a very cheap ($20) condenser mic that is ok, but I’m hoping for something in the hundred dollar range that can pick up sound a lot better. I have to pump up the gain on my cheap mic quite a bit right now.
The RØDE Microphones NT-USB Mini would be a great step up from that, comes highly recommended. (I have one in the household.) Also the AT2020 is a classic, but I haven't used it myself. I have a plethora Audio Technica headphones though, so I am partial to the brand.
Mine is a Steinberg UR22 audio interface, and a SeElectronics model X1 microphone, on the RØDE PSA1 microphone arm. As it was commented, this is overkill for my needs, but when I bought it (2015) there wasn't that much in the tier below this.
I'd likely look at Elgato's new audio interface if I was to buy again, the Steinberg is top of class but might be a bit too much for my needs. I did buy the audio part of my setup in 2015 though; a lot has happened since then.
I use NVIDIA Broadcast to process my voice (noise reduction; the microphone is crazy sensitive - and my desktop has good air cooling) for work, and Discord's built in for when I'm doing some gaming.
NVIDIA Broadcast's noise reduction is good enough to merit the GPU purchase for this feature alone - it doesn't compress your voice overly, let alone the video processing I'm also using to slightly blur the background - which is leagues ahead of e.g. Google Meet's built in feature.
I use multiple studio lights (Key Light, Key Light Air) for three point lighting. One of the two Hue bars is positioned behind my head up high for adding highlights to hair, headphone, the other lights up area behind my back. Check out youtube videos on Three point lighting, there's a good number of them - especially worth looking at the streamer ones. Again I don't stream, but everything applies.
I replied on the microphone Q nearby in the thread.
