The Best Budget Microphones for Streaming

Comfortably, and the microphone is rarely what makes home audio sound amateur. Distance, room reflections and background noise account for most of it, and all three are free to improve. A modest microphone used close, in a room with some soft furnishing, on an arm that isolates it from the desk, sounds better than an expensive one used badly at arm length in an echoing room. Fix position first and you may not need to spend more at all.

A boom arm, without much hesitation. It gets the capsule close to your mouth at the right angle and stops keyboard and desk knocks travelling straight into it, which addresses two of the three usual problems in one purchase. After that, anything soft that breaks up the reflections in the room: curtains, a rug, a bookshelf behind you. Both of those change recordings more than moving up a tier of microphone.

If plosive consonants are thumping, yes, and a cheap one solves it entirely. Many broadcast dynamic microphones have effective filtering built in and need nothing added. Condensers, and particularly cheap condensers, usually benefit. Before buying one, try speaking slightly across the microphone rather than directly into it: angling the capsule a little off-axis from your mouth removes most plosive energy for free and often makes the accessory unnecessary.