This has never been easier to start a podcast. The technological barriers to sharing your opinions on culture, politics, and hot sauce have never been lower, which is, in theory, a tremendous boon to the so-called “marketplace of ideas.”
Should any idiot with a hot take be allowed to broadcast their brains everywhere? This is an open question that the company is working out, so we’ll put it aside for now.
From an equipment perspective, the more pressing question is whether or not you need access to nepo baby cash to acquire the mics, headphones, cables, and stands to get started. And in that regard, there’s great news for anyone who thinks the world needs to hear their inner monologue as quickly and clearly as possible: budget-friendly podcasting equipment is cheap and plentiful. And it’s all over the place in terms of quality and functionality.
A good place to start looking is traditional brands that have been in the game for a while, and the new M Track Duo Producer Pack from M-Audio is an all-in-one package with a audio interfaceheadphones and a condenser mic, tying a bow around an affordable and accessible entry point into the digital creator space. It won’t dazzle you with its options or features, but it can turn the voice in your head into ones and zeros for low cost and minimal effort.
The podcast industrial complex
M-Audio has long been the model for inexpensive, functional and embarrassing recording equipment that’s just a click or two away from being seen on stage. Early iterations of its Fast Track series of audio interfaces powered countless bedroom recordings long before he was a bedroom artist, to which an appropriate aesthetic/genre label was applied, and did so for pennies compared to the big guys like Avid and Apogee, who anchored the upper price bracket of the segment.
Reddit users claim that Fast Track Pro still works on most pre-2019 computers, which is remarkable given that the ones that remain are holdovers from the second Bush era (and easy to find for under $50 on eBay). Class compliance, which allows users to simply plug the interface into their computer and get to work without worrying about drivers, proliferated in the early 2010s, and the modern interface market is now overrun with small sub-$200 boxes that convert an analog audio source into a digital signal that’s easy to capture in Garage Band, Reaper, or any other high-end digital audio workstation (DAW).
Cheap junk is everywhere, which makes the presence of a reliable, affordable brand like M-Audio all the more valuable to plebs who have plenty of time to pontificate but very little time to research gear.
