<p>I used the following microphones in roughly reverse order of my expectations of their quality:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.bluemic.com/en-gb/products/yeti/">Blue Yeti</a> via USB</li>
<li>Plantronics headset via USB (no link as over 10 years old)</li>
<li>Laptop (ASUS ZenBook UX550VD) internal mic</li>
<li>Desktop mic on a Windows 10 PC via a jack plug (no link as over 10 years old)</li>
<li>Phone (Samsung S9+) internal microphone</li>
<li>Same phone but with <a href="https://www.willful.info/willful/products/earbuds/40.html">T1 bluetooth earbuds</a></li>
</ul>
<p>All audio is mono. I used Audacity to record on my laptop at 44.1kHz. For the desktop mic I had to resort to using my son's desktop Windows 10 PC and Windows recording app which defaulted to 48kHz and I think it was the app rather than the mic that resulted in the surprisingly poor quality. It definitely sounds like some kind of noise gate is being applied but I didn't dig around to see what settings were available. For my phone's built-in mic I used Samsung's voice recording app which I presume came pre-installed on the phone. Recording via bluetooth on an android phone turned out to be tricky as the OS only wants you to use a bluetooth microphone for calls however I found an app called <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wimlog.bluvoicerecorder&amp;hl=en_GB&amp;gl=US">Bluetooth Headset Voice Recorder</a> and then enabled call audio on bluetooth and was able to record (the rubbish) audio.</p>
<p>I edited this show in audacity and contrary to my normal practice I did <em>not</em> remove noise from any of the recordings so that you can hear any hiss in all its glory. I did however tweak the gain on each track manually so that they were about the same volume.</p>
