Remind me not to hit the table. Welcome to season three. No, I'm sorry. Welcome to season two of The Daily Grateful.
I'm Michael Krosz. During our hiatus, and we did have a hiatus there, I was, and we weren't going to start until Monday, but it's Friday and we're starting today because everything's here and everything is working and everything's like really cool. And I tell you, it's just cool. I like it.
I am now working with all kinds of new equipment, just all kinds of new equipment. And I'm so grateful for all of this new equipment. Let's start with the microphone. All right.
I have been using, I have a, I have a very history with microphones. The microphone I used for, oh, well over 20 years was an RE20. And it was by Electrovoice, standard of the broadcast industry. Rush Limbaugh used an RE20, although his was spray painted gold.
And he said, the gold in the IB, it was spray painted gold. That's what it was. It was spray painted gold. Come on.
But anyway, I wonder where that's at now. Anyway, that was the standard. And then it broke. My RE20, which was over 20 years old.
You know, that's like a $450 microphone, standard of the industry. Used it, and then one day it didn't work. And I said, oh. And I called the network.
I said, microphone, the microphone's not working. What are we going to do? They said, we're going to overnight you a microphone so you have a microphone for this coming Saturday. I said, oh, good.
So they overnighted me a microphone. I have it in here. Where's that? Where did it go?
It's in this room somewhere. I'm not sure where. Oh, there it is. It's in that little case.
And it was a Samsung Q2U microphone. It's about a $60 microphone. And I'm saying, I'm going to do a nationally syndicated, you know, show with a $60 microphone. OK, so I plugged it into the thingy.
I had this thingy, this TASCAM thingy. It was a board. There's pictures of it that are giant board. I didn't know it had 9 million buttons on it.
Some guy named Blinky came down here. He set all those things right. When you talk, all you do is you take this little knob and you go up to right there where I put the magic marker. And when you don't wanna talk, you take it down.
That's all you have to do. Oh, you got to turn the thing on prior to us connecting with you to do the show. There's a button to turn the thing on. But you don't mess with any of these other things.
You don't touch any of this other stuff. So I got the new microphone and I figured out all by myself how to plug the $60 microphone in. So I plugged the $60 microphone in and I did not have high hopes. I put on my really good headphones, my Sennheisers, really, really good headphones.
And I, you know, said, OK, the show started and I started talking. I said, I don't notice any difference. Now I gotta tell you, at the time I was on a bunch of radio stations all across the country and I'll tell you who notices the difference is the audio engineers at those radio stations. And I figured, we're going to hear from these people.
Nope, didn't hear from any of them. Nobody noticed any difference with my $60 microphone. I said, well, damn. Well, eventually it took forever.
I mean, it literally took forever because they took the Electrovoice RE20 and sent it out to some guy in Ohio who is the genius at rebuilding those microphones and making them sound better than they sounded originally. But eventually it showed up here. So I disconnected the $60 microphone and connected that back in and I started using that out in the other studio. And it required, I've got to tell you, it was good, but it required different settings on that giant TASCAM board that was out there.
I don't know how to do those settings. I called Blinky. Blinky says, well, you take this one and you move it over there and see how it's set. And I, Blinky had to come 220 miles to my house.
I had the radio show to do. I plugged the $60 microphone back in. I'm doing the show with that. Blinky finally shows up on Monday or Tuesday, resets all the dials, has everything set exactly right.
And by then I had a telephone or I had a camera on my telephone. I took a picture of all of it. Okay. I'm really glad I did that, by the way.
More on that later. So I said, okay, this is good. And he set it up for the RE20 to work. The RE20 is working just fine with that.
And everything's going great until my grandson comes over one day and he's out in my studio. I never let grandkids into the studio. That's not a rule that I had. It's a rule I should have had.
Because my grandson crawls up on the table and there's 4,000 buttons up there. And he's twisting and turning and little, little, little. And I said, oh, man. Holy, you know, holy freaking cannoli.
You know, I'm not going to say what I said. I said bad words. I didn't say the bad words to my grandson. Loved the grandson.
I used to call him Boodlebutt. Now he's taller than I am. But anyway, so I called up Blinky. Blinky said, you took a picture of it, didn't you?
I said, yeah. He said, put everything back the way it was. So I take the picture. Then I realized how crappy the picture was on the cell phone that I had at the time.
And I'm like, there's got to be an easier way to do this. And I was getting to the point where I hated that studio anyway. It's in a small room on the other part of the house. And I had a bedroom now that was empty and I could move the studio into the bedroom.
So what did I do? I went out and I bought a new board for the radio show. I have it in a drawer here. And it's a crappy board.
It's a Behringer something or other. It has a bunch of buttons too. But I was able to figure it out. And I plugged everything into that.
And I left the Samsung or I left the other board out there. Just left it there. This giant, you know, looked like a radio station in there. And I'm using this Behringer board, which is like a $200 board.
And it was OK. And it was nice and everything. And then I went to a podcasting convention where they had every microphone on God's green earth there. They had the RE20.
They had everything. You could try out every microphone. You put on headphones and you could, well, I luckily had my own headphones because I don't like sharing headphones. It's just kind of weird.
But I had my own headphones. I had my Sennheisers. And I took that and I plugged it in and I started playing with microphones. As a matter of fact, I was playing with microphones for about three hours.
And I found this microphone called the RODECaster Pro. I'm sorry, the RODE Podcaster Pro. That's what it was. And I said, oh, I like the sound of this.
How much does this microphone cost? Oh, it's only $220. $220. I said, OK, I'm gonna buy me one.
He said, OK, but then you gotta buy, you need, it really requires a really good arm for it and you gotta have this shock mount for it and you gotta have this rubber thingy to put over it, you know, foam rubber thingy to put over it. By the time I was all done, it was like close to $400. But I really liked the microphone and I used that microphone until now. I use that microphone until now because RODE, who is fabulous, came out with another microphone and it's called the PodMic USB.
Now they also came out with something called the PodMic, which was a $99 microphone, which sounded absolutely marvelous. But then they came out with this one, which was the PodMic USB, which you could plug it into a USB cord right into your computer if you wanted to, or you could plug it into your audio interface if you wanted to. I wanted to plug it into the audio interface. And I said, no, how could a $200 microphone replace the microphone that I loved, even though it was made by the same people?
As it turns out, the RODE company out of Australia is like the Apple products of audio. They are like the kings of audio until Dave Jackson bought one and he stopped using his Electro-Voice RE20. And then he had the Shure SM7B, which is the other big, big microphone. He was using that.
He stopped using that and went to this $199 microphone. And I'm listening to him and he sounds really, really good. And then I asked him, he goes, yeah, I love that microphone. They did something to it.
It's just, you know, and for the $199 you get everything with it. It just comes with everything and ready to go. So anyway, one of my suppliers, there is a benefit. There are a few benefits to being a washed up former member of the national broadcast media.
And that's that people send you crap. And some company sent me one of these things. But then I said, I don't like this, you know, handle that this, this microphone stand that I've been