 If you are an online trainer or delivering on online speech, you want to make sure that your audio is on point. In this video, I am going to show you the different options available to you to nail your next presentation. Let's get started. Getting good audio is not about buying the most expensive gear. It is about understanding how sound works and to use it to your advantage. Sound is vibrations that travel as acoustic waves. They bounce off shiny surfaces like glass, concrete and other shiny surfaces. They get absorbed or diffused when they come in contact with soft surfaces like fabric, carpets and furniture. If you are an online trainer or delivering an online speech, the first thing you need to do is control your surroundings to avoid the sound reflections and other external noise. Place carpets, thick curtains and other furniture around the room to absorb sound. This will reduce the room echo that will be picked up by your microphone. Now that we have the theory out of the way, let's focus on the practical aspects of sound. Most of us use microphones that are built into our smartphones, our laptops or our web cameras. And to demonstrate this, let me now switch my audio to my Logitech web camera. I am now speaking using the Logitech C310. As you may notice, this gives decent sound quality but this kind of microphones tend to pick up surrounding room noise which can sound irritating. This is good enough for normal conversations but if you are delivering an online speech or an online training, this will not have the impact of good audio. Next let me demonstrate a high end web camera. This is the sound coming from the Logitech Brio 4K. This web camera has dual microphones with noise cancellation technology that is supposed to improve the quality of sound. I am sure this sounds far better than the C310 but this also picks up surrounding noise and it doesn't have the feel of professional audio. The solution for good audio is to get the microphone as close to your mouth as possible. The audio that you are hearing now is coming from this wireless headset. The wired headsets work the same way. Since the microphone is close to my mouth, you will not hear the room noise. This kind of microphones give good audio quality as long as you don't mind having a big headset wrapped around your head. The next option we can try is a lavalier microphone. This has the same principle as the wireless headset that is to get the microphone as close to your mouth as possible. Left mics are great because they give good sound and they stay out of your way. This particular lavalier microphone that I am using comes with a 6 meter cable. This gives you the flexibility to move around while delivering your training or your speech. Continuing with our lavalier microphones. If you have to move around while delivering your training or speech, the logical choice is a wireless lavalier microphone. The sound that you are currently hearing is from my Rode Wireless Go, one of my favorite devices whenever I want to deliver a speech standing unencumbered by wires. But what if you want high quality audio that is always connected to your laptop and you don't have to worry about wires, connections, battery levels. The solution is a USB condenser microphone. The sound that you are currently hearing is from my Rode Anti USB Mini. It's a small microphone that you connect to your PC using a USB cable and that's all there is to it. It gives great studio quality sound as long as you can keep the microphone close to your mouth. In my case, I keep it around 6 inches away from my mouth and that gives me great audio quality. If you want the highest quality audio, then the gold standard is a dynamic microphone. Like the Rode Procaster that I am currently using or something similar, these devices are complicated to set up and can cost from a few hundred dollars to a thousand dollars or more. Inside the microphone, you need special audio cables, an audio interface to connect the audio to your PC or your laptop and depending on the microphone, you may need a mic activator like a cloud lifter. Dynamic microphones are great because they reject most of the room noise and they give you that great audio quality that you get from an FM radio station. However, you need to be very close to the dynamic microphone, otherwise the sound will not be clear. I hope this demonstration gave you an insight on the different options available to you to create a high impact in your next online presentation. The choice of audio will depend on the objectives. Will you be sitting in one place while delivering your presentation or do you need to move around? Choose the device based on the objective. Please leave a comment below on what device you currently use and what device you wish to upgrade to. I wish you all the best.