Microphones and audio setup for voice games
You need less equipment than the internet will tell you and more attention to the room than anybody mentions.
Start with the question almost nobody asks first: does the game you are playing record you at all? A local desktop dubbing game generally does not — you perform out loud into a room and the room is the audience. In that case a microphone buys you nothing.
A microphone matters in exactly two situations: you are streaming or recording the session, or you are playing with people who are not there, over a call or in a browser game that captures your take. Everything below is about those two.
The room beats the microphone
This is the part that gets skipped and it is the part with the largest effect. A mid-range microphone in a soft room sounds better than an expensive one in a kitchen, and it is not close. Hard parallel surfaces produce reflections that arrive a few milliseconds after your voice, and the result reads to a listener as 'cheap' without them being able to say why.
In order of how much they help per unit of effort:
- Get closer to the microphone. Halving the distance roughly doubles your voice against the room. This is free and it is the biggest single improvement available to most people.
- Put something soft behind you and something soft opposite you. A curtain, a duvet, a bookshelf that is actually full. You are killing the first reflection, not soundproofing.
- Get off the desk. Desk vibration and keyboard noise travel up a stand; a boom arm or even a folded towel under the base removes a category of noise entirely.
- Do not perform under a hard ceiling in the middle of an empty room, which is the worst case and also, unfortunately, where most desks are.
What to actually buy
| Budget | What it gets you | Worth it when |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing | Wired earbuds with an inline mic | You are joining someone else's game. Genuinely fine, and better than a laptop's built-in mic because it is near your mouth. |
| Entry | A USB cardioid condenser or dynamic | You host, stream or record. This is the step with by far the largest jump in quality. |
| Mid | A dynamic mic plus a small interface | Your room is bad and you cannot fix it. Dynamics reject the room far better, which is why broadcasters use them. |
| High | Anything above that | You are doing this professionally. For a party game it is spending money on the wrong problem — see the room, above. |
Cardioid rather than omnidirectional, whatever you buy. Cardioid hears what is in front of it and rejects what is behind, which is what you want when the thing behind you is a video playing.
The settings that ruin a performance
- Aggressive noise suppression. It is tuned for speech at a conversational level and a dubbing performance is not that. It hears a shouted character voice as noise and gates the funniest half-second of the take.
- A hard noise gate. Same problem in a different shape: it cuts the quiet, low, slow delivery that is often the best thing in a scene.
- Automatic gain control. It rides your level while you are deliberately playing with level, which is precisely what makes a performance dynamic.
- Input gain set so a normal speaking voice hits the top of the meter. Leave headroom, because you are going to get louder than you rehearsed.
The general rule: every one of those features exists to make a meeting intelligible, and you are not in a meeting. Turn them off, get closer, and leave headroom.
Hear yourself, but not twice
Wear headphones. Speakers put the scene's audio back into your microphone and, in a call, put everyone else back in too. Closed-back if you have them, because open-backed headphones leak enough at performance volume to be picked up.
If your setup lets you hear yourself with any delay at all, turn that off. Delayed sidetone is genuinely disruptive to speech — it is a known effect and it will make you stumble over lines you know perfectly well.