Your VO Questions Answered: What is the Best Mic for Voiceover?

This is one of the most often-asked questions among newer voice actor: What is The Best Mic™ for VO and voiceover?

The Best Mic for Voiceover is the one you have.

Seriously – the microphone is almost never the deciding factor in VO.

Spend all your money on a mic. Put it in a poorly treated room. And it will capture every nuance of that space. In other words, it will sound horrible.

Spectacular mics will dutifully record every nanosecond of a dreadful performance.

Invest in your training. Then in your space. Then get a decent microphone and interface. Note, that’s “decent” – not “best”.

Which Microphone is Best? Which microphone is this? Does that matter? Yep, it's a good mic but it's in a great room.

What Matters for Voiceover Microphones

It’s so easy to get distracted by this futile quest. There are hours of video mic “shoot-outs” on the internet – featuring microphones you know and models you’ve never heard of.

Fact: The audio samples playing in all of those microphone comparison videos are compressed and processed (it’s the nature of youtube or other video players – they all change the actual audio to some degree). So, using that audio to make a decision is not optimum.

There are plenty of good sounding mics in the $250 and up neighborhood (arguably these days even a few bucks less!). For VO, Large-Diaphragm Condenser microphones are usually the recommended option. They do tend to be more sensitive (which is good because they capture every detail of your tone, but challenging because that includes the room in which you are recording).

It makes a lot of sense to understand what constitutes “good audio” – it’s one of the reasons I offer a free audio review of your voiceover setup. Echoes, weird resonances, “boxy” sounds, background noises… those are all no-no’s. And none of them have anything to do with the device capturing the audio.

In other words, whether you are booking or not booking, the cause is unlikely to be the microphone.

Sure – pay attention to what working voice actors mention – there are certain makes/models which are good tools and are often referenced. But, there’s no “magic” best mic. If you have a thin and reedy voice, you likely don’t want an overly bright sounding mic in front of you, just as a deep voiced talent on a bass-y mic will tend to sound overly boomy.

All mics have different frequency response curves – another reason that the “best” mic for my voice may not be the “best” mic for your voice. Flat response curves are often the wiser choice for talent recording from a home studio. That lets the voice actor provide clean and balanced audio to the engineer who will be putting it into the final product.

Whatever mic you end up with, it’s not likely to be the last mic you ever buy. Get something decent, ask engineers what they are using when they mic you (and “why?” if they have the time to answer) and upgrade if it makes sense to do so.