Inside the incredible traveling podcast recording kit
We are fanatical about sound here at WaitWhat. To make our podcast Masters of Scale, we’ll record in a good studio, or we’ll send an audio engineer on location — either way, the goal to make sure our host, Reid Hoffman, can sit face-to-face with a guest. Host and guest use high-end microphones that have been set up and tested with care, and positioned carefully to preserve eye contact that lets the conversation flow. Like so:
But obviously, that’s not how we’re doing things right now.
It became clear to us in late February that we were likely to face a world where guests aren’t willing to travel to the Bay Area to record with Reid or with Caterina Fake, the host of our sister show Should This Exist? — much less step into an audio studio to record a Meditative Story. We knew there might even be guests who weren’t comfortable receiving an audio engineer in their office or home. It seemed unlikely, even outlandish at the time, but we decided to prepare.
“The question soon became: How do we continue to record interviews when people can’t leave their homes — and how do we keep the same quality?” said Masters of Scale producer Jordan McLeod. “That was the big looming question, and it had to be answered so quickly.”
Our team started by asking: What gear do we have available now that we could just send to guests? But we quickly pivoted toward the idea of buying equipment and creating kits that our guests could set up on their own.
“Some of our guests have zero technological skills, while others started tech companies,” said Jordan. “So you have to have equipment that works for all kinds of people.”
Jordan quickly remembered “a little recording device that I had seen used for a podcast interview before. You just plug it in to a microphone and you hit a button, as easy as charging your phone. Then we asked: is the type of audio file it’s going to record, is it the type of audio file that we need? Is it the right sample rate? Is it the right bit depth? And it was, plus being affordable and compact and easy to use and had great ratings and there were plenty in stock that could get shipped to us in two days. The stars aligned.”
The WaitWhat audio team, including Jordan’s brother Chris McLeod, our mixer Bryan Pugh, and our Head of Development and Production Jai Punjabi, started brainstorming in Slack about the perfect mic for the travel kit.
“We needed to find a dynamic microphone that had a cardioid pattern so that it would eliminate as much room noise as possible,” Jordan says, “but we didn’t want something that would be thin; we wanted something that would really capture the low end of a person’s voice, the presence of a person’s voice, which is hard to get on a standard handheld dynamic microphone. You want something that has a little bit more pickup in the frequency spectrum, but at the same time, you want it to cut out as much room noise as possible — because you’re trying to get away from hearing air conditioners and vacuum cleaners and TVs in the background and husbands making sandwiches while wives are trying to conduct interviews.”
“Eventually we found a broadcast microphone that is often used in the field for TV or radio interviews. It’s kind of long, it looks kind of funky, but it’s broadcast-quality. It’s not quite as high quality as what we usually use, but it’s really, really close, and it’s a smaller footprint and fits in a normal microphone clip . It doesn’t look like a studio mic — it looks less intimidating.”
As Jordan recalls: “There’s a whole Masters of Scale episode worth of theories about how we bought the rest of the gear. Bottom line: Experiment early and often.”
“We had to find the right microphone stand, the right microphone clip, all that stuff. We added a pop filter, because a dynamic microphone like we’re using picks up quite a bit of low end, and there is the opportunity for a lot of plosives to happen. A plosive is when you hear someone say a P or a B and you hear that pop sound on the microphone. A pop filter helps that. We have a foam one that just fits over the microphone we bought, with a small footprint.
“Because of course we also had to ship everything. Our Production Director, Adam Hiner, one of his specialties is, he takes a storm of ideas and calms them down and zooms out and say, ‘I see you guys doing all this. This is great. Well, you’re forgetting these things.’ And what we were forgetting was: How do we make it sanitary, how do we make it safe?”
“So they make Pelican cases that are waterproof, that are fireproof, that are all these things -proof, right? And that means that nothing can get inside of it. It’s airtight. And if it’s airtight, then diseases aren’t getting in there when it’s being shipped. So Hiner said: Let’s buy a small Pelican case that is just big enough to fit all the recording items we need. And that is our shipping container. You can wipe it down completely; it’s molded plastic. So it gets there, you spray it, you wipe it, it’s clean.”
Our production manager, Chaurley Meneses, looked up the CDC standards for sanitizing, and made a plan to sanitize every item as she pulled it out of the manufacturer’s packaging before it went into the kits.
Only one problem: In New York, in the middle of March, sanitizing supplies were almost impossible to get. To the rescue: Chaurley’s mom in Oklahoma! As she says: “Two days later, in the mail, I get a care package with tons of Clorox Wipes and the Lysol spray. Mom saves the day.”
Once built, the kits go in and out to guests by FedEx, with a huge assist from Chaurley’s very patient doorman. When a kit comes back from a guest, says Chaurley, “I individually will wipe down each piece of equipment, fan them out so that they can air-dry, exchange all of the batteries. We send a little packet that tells you: welcome to your kit, this is what’s in your kit, this is how you put the kit together, this is how you upload your audio file to use when you’re done. And I’ve got that in a little plastic sleeve so I can wipe it down too.”
“Once everything is air-dried, it goes back into the box, I close it, and it’s ready to go back out again. Right now we have 21 total kits moving all around the country — and even a couple across the pond.”
As Jordan says: “Almost everybody who received the kit immediately raved about how easy it was, how simple it was, how clean it was, how great they felt about it. It just worked.”
The full gear list is below:
Microphone: Sennheiser MD46
Recorder: Tascam DR-10x
Stand: Auray TT-6220
Windscreen: Sennheiser MZW-1
Clip: Sennheiser MZQ 800
Case: Pelican 1400
And here’s the 4-page instructions for a quick setup and upload after recording.
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