Audiobook recording equipment

The microphone matters less than the room. Here's how to choose gear for the room you actually have, and what to fix before you spend anything.

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Test your room before you buy

ACX's hardest number for home narrators is the noise floor: the quietest part of your file must be at or below -60 dB. That's mostly decided by your room (fans, fridges, traffic, echo), not your microphone. An expensive condenser in a noisy room fails; a cheap dynamic mic in a closet passes.

So measure first. Open the recorder with whatever mic you have (even a headset), record 10 seconds of room tone, and it will tell you your projected noise floor. If it's already close to -60 dB, buy for voice quality. If it's well above, spend on the room first.

Which kind of microphone?

USB or interface? A USB mic plugs straight in and works in the browser, which is the easiest path for an author narrating one book. An XLR mic plus an audio interface costs a bit more but lets you upgrade either part later, and interfaces have cleaner gain. Both are fine for ACX.

Microphones

USB, for untreated rooms

• Samson Q2U: a budget dynamic with both USB and XLR, so it can move to an interface later. A long-time favourite for starting out.
• Audio-Technica ATR2100x-USB: the same idea (dynamic, USB and XLR) with a slightly more polished sound.
• Shure MV7+: a premium dynamic with USB and XLR. It has built-in processing: in Shure's app, switch to manual gain and turn the denoiser and auto-level off, or ACX may hear it as over-processed.

USB, for quiet rooms

• Audio-Technica AT2020USB-X: an inexpensive, well-liked USB condenser.
• Rode NT1 (5th generation): one of the quietest condensers made, and it has both USB-C and XLR outputs, so it covers both paths.

XLR, with an interface

• Audio-Technica AT2020 (condenser) for a quiet room on a budget.
• Shure SM7dB (dynamic) for a less-than-perfect room. It has a built-in preamp, so it doesn't need the extra booster the classic SM7B usually does.
• Interface: Focusrite Scarlett Solo (4th gen) or MOTU M2. One mic input is all a narrator needs.

Quieting and deadening the room

This is where a modest budget does the most. Two problems, two fixes:

• Noise (hum, hiss, traffic) comes from sources. Turn off HVAC, fans, the fridge if you can hear it, and move the computer away from the mic. Record at quiet times of day. No amount of foam stops noise coming through a wall.
• Echo (a roomy, hollow sound) comes from hard surfaces. Soft, heavy material near you absorbs it. A walk-in closet full of clothes is a classic home booth.

For echo, heavy moving blankets hung behind and beside you are cheap and effective. Thick 2-inch or thicker acoustic panels (fibreglass or mineral wool) work better than thin foam squares, which only absorb the highest frequencies.

Small things that prevent rejections

• Pop filter: stops the bursts of air on "p" and "b" that ACX flags as plosives.
• Boom arm or a stand with a shock mount: keeps desk bumps and keyboard taps out of the mic.
• Closed-back headphones, such as the Sony MDR-7506 or Audio-Technica ATH-M50x: you can't catch mouth clicks on laptop speakers, and ACX listens on headphones.
• A tablet stand: read from a screen at eye level instead of paper, so there are no page turns to edit out.
• Water, and green apple slices: the narrator's old trick against mouth noise. Free.

What not to buy (yet)

• A portable vocal booth or reflection shield on the mic stand: it helps a little with echo from behind the mic, but it does nothing about the room behind you.
• Noise-reduction plugins to rescue a noisy room: heavy noise reduction trades a noise-floor failure for an "over-processed" one. See why ACX rejects audio.
• A second mic. Consistency between chapters matters more than any upgrade, so record the whole book on one setup.