Good quality audio requires a good quality sound source to begin with. For this purpose, I decided to look into reasonably good quality condenser microphones. My search ended with the Neewer NW 5200.

While searching online for a microphone, I came across the Neewer range which is available under different brand names, and a popular choice with a lot of podcasters are the NW-700 or NW-800 models, and with the sound quality they produce, it’s easy to see why.

After much research online, the Neewer range of microphones appear to give reasonable quality at a budget price.

Very obviously, the quality can’t be directly compared to, say, a 3K GBP Neumann studio mic, however, the Chinese Neewer range of microphones produce an amazing sound quality for the price. I finally decided on the Neewer NW-5200 professional broadcast microphone.

This microphone is a step up from the NW-7/800 models and has extra features such as a switchable low pass filter, a 10db attenuator and the ability to use it with cardioid, omni or bi-directional pickup patterns. The mic uses a large diaphragm capsule and requires a 48v phantom power supply.

The microphone is fed into a small mixer, through some audio processing and finally into the radio. Details of the mixer and audio processing rack can be found on this page.