I’m not sure how the decision was made or that a decision was needing to be made for that matter.   I’m not even sure what events happened that lead us to having the idea that for the core products at Rust Media having the recording be as portable as possible it the route to go.  So with portability in mind we set about to run some audio tests.    We’re still looking at what the final hardware is going to be but using our notebooks we tried our a few different headset mics, two USB and one straight analog.  The clear winner was the Plantronics 645 USB headset it gave the best sound and performance of the headsets we tested and at about $30-$40 is reasonably priced.  The analog only headset we tried gave a good sound but using the onboard audio hardware of the laptops gave us poor response time and would occasionally garble the audio stream.  The last USB only headset while performance response being good the sound quality from the mic just wasn’t there.

The tests were ran by two of us getting on Skype and making a call the calls were recorded using Total Recorder which produces an mp3 and a raw wave file out that we then checked to see how things sounded, not very indepth I know but it did the job we needed.  The sound quality coming through Skype is more than acceptable and we see little post processing needed to output a final show.

We’ve still to settle on what additional hardware we’re going to need as well as the software to post process and package the final product but we now know how to input our content so to speak. There is still a lot of behind the scenes boring tedious work to go but things are progressing and I can declare this weekend’s tests a success.

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