Wearing headphones as a podcaster is a simple way to ensure the quality of the sound is high. Stuff your ears with cotton balls and you’ll hear your voice better and block out noise around you. This same principle applies to podcasters to hear themselves better and block out any superfluous sounds.
This is especially important when having guests on your podcast as that’s where unpleasant feedback coming from the speakers can totally ruin a recording session.
In addition to these basic reasons, wearing headphones while recording a podcast helps to improve the audio in the following ways.
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Why Wear Headphones When Recording?
When you close your ears, you are better able to hear the slightest tone to your voice. That’s why singers put a finger to close their ears while singing and trying to hit the hard notes. This is because you block the sound around you, including any ambient, droning noise that is just part of the natural world. No matter how quiet the space around you seems to be, there will always be some subtle hum in the background. With no interaction between your voice and the world around you, you are better able to hear exactly how you will sound on microphone to a listener.
Another bonus of wearing headphones is you can hear whether or not someone is talking too softly or too loud. To fix these problems, you can either have them speak up or talk softer, or adjust their microphones to make them louder or quieter.
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Why Do Recordings Sound Better with Headphones?
Podcast host wearing headphones while recording
Headphones give podcasters control over their sound quality and can allow them to adjust during a special, one-shot interview in real time. They want to ensure that the sound quality is good while it’s happening. Without headphones, it is much harder to know that. In fact, it’s almost impossible.
Also, when a guest is not in the studio with a podcaster and is meeting through an online source or phone, wearing headphones helps you to hear whether their own audio is acceptable. You will not have the same audio setup, most likely, and so the tone and quality of the audio may not be as good as yours. To ensure that people can hear your guest, you need to wear headphones.
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How Headphones Help Audio Issues
While recording podcasts, the microphones the podcasters use will pick up any noise coming from the speakers. It can come across as an echoing sound where one person talking will hit the other person’s microphone. Wearing headphones eliminates this problem. Wearing headphones also eliminates any unpleasant feedback coming from the speakers, which can sometimes turn into an audio feedback loop where the audio continues to repeat itself louder and louder once it’s picked up by one microphone and another.
