I recently created an article on the top 10 best headphones for podcasting, but are good headphones important when creating a podcast? Find out in this episode.

Are good headphones important for recording your podcast? I recently did an article on the 10 best podcasting headphones over at podcastfast.com/24. And there, I listed the top 5 headphones that I recommend. As well as some best in class headphones, like the best cheapest headphones, the best noise cancelling headphones, the most comfortable headphones, etc. But it got me asking the question, “Is it actually important to have good headphones when you’re doing your podcasting?”

I’ve got a great pair of headphones that I’m wearing right now that you’ll be able to see if you’re on Youtube. And they’re the Audio Technica ATH-M50X, which are a great pair of headphones, extremely comfortable and deliver great quality sound. Before that, I actually had – I’ll just show you, I had some Beats here.

I got the Solo Beats, which I didn’t really like. They were just too pressing on my ears and just really uncomfortable. Actually, you might not believe it, but most of the time, when I’m podcasting, I just use these bad boys and these are the Apple earpods. So that’s kind of my podcast headphones that I use.

Back to the question, “Is it important to have good headphones when podcasting?” Well, if you’re a professional podcaster and you do a lot of podcasting and good quality sound is important to you. Like, you’ve bought a high quality microphone, you’ve got a pop filter. Maybe running through a mixer or an audio interface or something like that, if you’re a professional podcaster really focused on high quality sound, like creme de la crop of quality sound, then you’re going to want some good headphones because you need to understand whether or not the sound is going to be good.

For me, I bang out a lot of different podcast that aren’t super high quality in terms of the sound. My sound quality is good, but it’s not phenomenal. And in terms of editing, I don’t do a lot of editing or post-production to my sound. So for me, what I use my good quality headphones for is basically, I will put them on when I’m setting up to record for the day or whenever I’m changing settings.

So right now, I’m filming a video so I’ve got the gain on my microphone a little bit higher than when I would podcast usually without a video because when I podcast without a video, I would turn the gain down, I would move closer the podcast. Let me just turn the gain down. So I’d move closer to the podcast because you’re just going to get a better sound. There’s going to be less background noise.

So what I will do is I’ll put my headphones on, I’ll plug them into my USB microphone, which is the Blue Yeti and I’ll adjust the gain. I’ll adjust my distance from it and just make sure that it sounds right. Often, I’ll turn the volume up extremely loud in my own ears. That way, I can just really get an understanding of whether or not the sound is going to be too high or not and then I can go ahead and adjust the gain. But usually, I leave the sound somewhere around the middle.

So, are good quality headphones important? Not really. I don’t think they’re hyper important for your average podcaster. Because rather than doing this, I could basically achieve the same thing with my Apple Earpods. So let me just get them and let me see the sound difference when I plug these in and I’ll let you know how it goes. Because this is something I haven’t actually really tested on the fly. Okay. So let’s turn this all the way up.

I can still hear the background noise through these headphones,