heh... brain overload. talk about cramming the recording industry into my head over the course of an afternoon.
so the nickel lowdown on podcasting hardware.
microphone and headset: duh. obvious. one you listen through, the other you tak through.
mixer: takes individual lines of sound and "mixes" them together. pretty much essential if you want to have a conversation with the person next to you (a cheaper alternative is to share a microphone)
compressor/processor: the big thing that this does (from what I understnad) is keep everything at a reasonably audible level. This means that if I'm talking and I'm really loud, it drops my volume and if you're talking and you're really quiet, it raises your volume. There are some other things that it does, but I don't know what those are yet.
hybrid: this is the magic item. this is the thing that connects a phone line to the whole apparatus and makes it seem like that person on the phone is another mike in the studio. Teh cheapest retail price I've seen for this thing is $600-. On ebay you'd get it for less.
so that's that. from what I've gathered, this is the way it goes:
the most essential thing is the mike. with a decent mike connected right into a PC, you can edit out the worst static with software. reasonably clear, but not broadcast quality.
the second most essential thing is a mixer and addtional mikes. now you can do face to face interviews without sharing a mike, which means that you're not going to be leaning in to each other like stand ins in "The Lady and the Tramp". You can also put that second mike adjacent to a speakerphone and get reasonably good results.
the third most essential thing is the processor thingie. apparantly, its much better to just fiddle with the raw feed before it gets digitzed on your computer. *shrug* that's what they tell me, anyway. i suppose if they told me that apples are really 40' tall I'd have to believe them, too.
lastly, you have the hybrid. we can do a decent podcast, i think, without it - though the phone interviews might sound scratchy. the equipment is also raher portable - so I can see lugging it to convnetion, for example, and doing a bunch of interviews there and releasing them to the public over the next six months.
i haven't figured out prices yet, but as a rough dollar figure It'll be below $500-. (Ideally, below $250- but that may be wishful thinking). As for donations/grants I'm still doing research. The less I spend, the better
John
PS: Cindy, Skype seems to be favorably reviewed in a number of places. I still have concerns over how willing the party at the other end would be to using it (or how much in phone bills I'll be forking over). Ideally, I'd prefer to capture a good feed right off a land line, even if that part of the program gets edited in later (that's apparantly common and easy to do)
The NSS and WNS: Cooperation, not confrontation.