Thriller (and tons of music before and after) was recorded on the Shure SM7. You can buy that mic for $400. In fact, you've seen this mic used by podcasters everywhere.

The mic cost is almost irrelevant though. A good mic will last decades unless abused. Let's say you want a variety of sounds. You buy a bunch of instrument mics (probably $100 each) and a few matched pairs of all the most popular vocal mics (most of those will run 1-2k per pair). You'll probably not spend over 20k in total. Over 20 years, that's only $1,000 per year or less than $100 per month. In that same 20 years, you will have upgraded your digital equipment several times at an expense far greater than $1,000 per year (upgrading your $3,500 macbook every 4 years is the same amount of money).

If you make your money with those mics, that cost is hardly worth mentioning. It's like people complaining that ergonomic keyboards cost $300. The keyboard will easily last a decade or more (only $1-2 per month to save a lot of future pain). In that same time, you'll probably spend 10k+ on other equipment. Same thing with monitors where $1000 will far outlast that same amount of money put into the computer itself.

I don't recommend listening to this comparison because the U87 is high-pass filtered and the other two are not. It makes the U87 sound very bad IMO.

Drastic differences between the three! The Røde is certainly acceptable for most circumstances, but the Fifine sounds like absolute crap in my opinion.

That was great!

I'd say the $250 mic was the best value, but that German mic was niiiice. If you can afford it, then it's probably the one you want.

what are your thoughts on the Blue Yeti? I dont really like it but it seems SUPER popular...

The Yeti is popular because it's a USB microphone and it got in early. It's not a bad microphone (at all, somebody telling you it is wants to sell you something) but it's generally misapplied in most settings where it finds itself.

For simple spoken-word stuff like conferences or streams or whatever, something like a Samson Q2U or an AT2005USB/ATR2100 are less sensitive to unwanted noise and easier for an untrained user to get a good sound out of, while moving into the XLR space gets you access to better dynamic microphones and also some pretty reasonably priced condensers that do quite well (though there's some up-front investment in the audio hardware, of course).

I own a yeti (and a yeti pro) among quite a few other mics.

It's actively bad for most people for one reason: capacitive mics pick up everything.

If your room isn't soundproofed, it will be very hard to keep noise out of your recording. Dynamic mics are much less sensitive in this regard.

I would instead recommend a Samson 2Qu or Audio Technica ATR2100-USB on the low end ($70-100) or the Shure MV7 ($250) on the high end for plug-n-play mics.

If you want to move into a cheap audio interface (eg, Focusrite Scarlett Solo + cloudlifter), I'd recommend either the Shure SM7b or the ElectroVoice re20 on the higher end and the Shure sm57 on the cheaper end (good enough for the president to use for the last 40-ish years).

> It's actively bad for most people for one reason: capacitive mics pick up everything.

This is a myth that's popular with podcasters. If you get as close to a condenser mic as you must with a less-sensitive dynamic mic* and crank down the gain accordingly, you'll find that condenser mics don't magically capture more ambient noise than than dynamic mics.

* Using a fist as a measure, your mouth should be between 1-2 fists away from the mic.

This is true.

With a good preprocessor (I use a Symetrix I got from an old radio station), I can crank my dynamic mic (EV RE320) to levels that will pick up anything happening in my entire house, with my office door closed.

It's just that the levels from condenser mics tend to be hotter, so by default you hear more stuff in the room unless you get in close and turn it down.

There's no way to replicate the 'radio' sound if you're 2 or 3 ft away from the mic.

RE20 also has a lower-cost sibling that comes in black, the RE320. Almost identical styling and sound for $100 less.

I have a yeti and XLR mics and lavalier mics. For ease of use without hassle the Yeti is good but you must use the right setting and account for gain. It picks up a decent amount of ambient sound. That extra noise will muddy your vocals. I’ve gone the route of a simple lavalier setup for most of my video calls and presentations.

It's fucking junk, sounds awful.

For what it's worth I'm an audio engineering expert, produced albums, broadcast stuff, and used to review professional studio audio equipment for a living for a national magazine.

People like it because it's simple and it looks cool.

If you want something that has the same basic usability, ie plugs directly into USB and is really easy to use with computer audio, buy the Apogee Mic Plus.

I recently experimented with pretty much everything in this category and was very happy with this model, bought a dozen of them for use in a virtual conference series, where I wanted something I could send to non-technical people who'd never be able to navigate a pro audio interface. I've been very happy with it so far.

It's ok but absolutely overhyped.