 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosel here bringing you another video today for my Familiar redaccurated home office. I'm actually want to make this video about microphones about the Audio Technica AT 2020 microphone, which is what you are listening to me speak into here I picked up this microphone a couple of Months ago probably less maybe just last month. I was over in the United States For six weeks and I was looking for a microphone that was you know an XLR microphone, but decent quality I was using a combination of uh, my ono usb microphone and a little lav mic for these youtube videos And I figured it was time to look at the next Upgrade or the next thing so using a XLR mic through an audio interface sounded like a good Challenge for me. So that is what I looked for and I bought this based upon price It's about a hundred dollars for this microphone And that was kind of what I could have for it in terms of a microphone upgrade Now I did not realize that I was buying a celebrity Celeb microphone, and I'm just kidding. But the Audio Technica AT 2020 is actually better known It's better known microphone than I realized. It's that's because it's actually quite old This microphone has been in use for in production for I should say more than two decades Which says quite something about both its quality and its popularity I don't think Audio Technica are keeping it going for that long just for the hell of it So this is actually quite a well-known mic and when I bought it You know, I mean uh buy microphones for a while now. So I just opened the box and put it into um One of these fellas the uh, you know mic uh shock mount attached to a scissor switch And I thought everything was gravy, but I did notice I did the first thing I did after unboxing it was You know, I did a couple of test recordings and I was like This doesn't really make sense. It doesn't actually sound all that great And last night I was on youtube and you know, I try to watch a lot of Sound content. I just audio video content about youtube from guys who really know What they're doing. So I watched a I watched a great clip last night called the audio technica at 2020 Five things five mistakes. You don't want to make or something like that. So I clicked into it and I said, you know, maybe they're gonna Talk about stuff. I might already know it first one was um, it requires phantom power And I said well at least at least I have that right. I knew that I'm using it with phantom power and the second tip though was Make sure you're speaking into the front of the microphone And make sure you're side addressing and I was like what side addressing And what is the front of the microphone? So it turns out the first thing I did after buying this at 2020 was Get a foamy and a shock mount and put it right onto the microphone And in doing so I obscured the Front and back Labels but actually there's only a label on the back and it is Here As you guys can see that says back now, there isn't something on the other side saying front It just says it just has the audio technica logo So that is the correct way to use this microphone You need to have it with the audio technica logo facing you and the back logo facing It's supposed to be 180 degrees apart if you can see where the back thing is and where the audio technica is They're offset 180 degrees on this microphone. Now the second thing that I learned Um, and which I was already fortunately kind of doing was that this is what's called a side address microphone If you haven't come across that term before there's two um address types one of them is side address and one of them is top address Now if you have a side address microphone like the at 2020 you want to be doing what I'm doing and speaking into the side, right? there is There's sides to there's you know Or there's actually a little bit of metal on either side But there is two kind of panels the front and the back Clearly the back panel is where the pickup pattern is not intended to capture audio from But there's also this at the top and that is a top now that that is not what you want to be speaking into If it was it would be called a front address microphone So what I'm going to do now is deliberately speak into the top and you should hopefully notice the audio quality being less good Here I am speaking into the top using the audio technica at 2020 as a front address microphone And now I'm very carefully positioning the microphone. So we're back into side address mode Now let's actually also compare front and back pickup just so you guys can see I mean when I last night watched this it was two in the morning. I jumped onto my computer. I said I have to Try trying to run the microphone and I was amazed at the difference So this is me using the microphone correctly speaking into the front side of its of the microphone And this is me using the audio the microphone incorrectly as I have been doing for the past month and probably for 10 or 20 of my youtube videos I hope you guys can hear i'm trying to speak quite slowly that the tonality is just not there and also the room It just sounds very tinny. So this is deliberately speaking into the microphone at the wrong side where its pickup pattern is not optimized Now we're going back to the front of the microphone Now the final thing I want to say in in terms of how to use this microphone And by the way, I'm going to put this up on youtube with no post processing whatsoever I'm not even going to normalize The audio as I usually do to minus 23 lufs just so that you guys can actually see You know the exact differences For what it's worth. I'm recording this this test Clip uh through the uh beringer euphoria um2 which is a really popular Budget audio interface and I have the gain set to about 55 And finally I'm recording this on the software level into obs studio And into obs studio running on a bunch of Linux because I'm in a bunch of uh freak So that is the software component of what you're listening to final thing is regarding the uh distance from the microphone So I've heard a few recommendations some folks recommend taking four fingers and the width of your four fingers which would be Here so actually i'm about four fingers width maybe five other folks recommend Putting your hand into a fist And then speaking at this distance So this is me coming a little back from the microphone And i'm deliberately positioning it downwards so that you can see my mouth and my face And this is me coming really really close up to the microphone Final thing in the audio test So if you guys are thinking about buying this and you're not sure Whether to buy a foamy a pop filter whatnot I haven't yet used it much with an actual pop filter But for most of my videos I do use a foamy now the thing about the foamy is it's very easy to obscure The front and back and audio technical buttons So I just recommend fitting it Just so that you can see the audio technical logo even if it means Putting the foamy not fully down just so that that's not obscured because again that is the that's your cue That it's the front of the microphone On the side of the microphone you have p48 phantom power Cardioid condenser that's on this side And on the other side you have at 2020 and the registered trademark symbol And on the back you have back so basically there's only one one audio technical Um logo written on this microphone and that's what you want to be aiming for so I'm going to just use the foamy now So you guys can hear a quick sound comparison with and without foamy foamy's gone on and actually this was a foamy that was designed For the at 2020 so it fits perfectly I don't actually need to even put it too low and you can see it just hugs over the metal but it leaves the It leaves the audio technical visible on the front side And on the back side it leaves the back Uh Visible so if you own the audio technica at 2020 and like me you're kind of like I thought this was a really really good mic. Oh There you go. See how easy it is to be speaking into the wrong part of the microphone Um, so yeah, if you like me bought the audio technica at 2020 and you're like I thought this was an amazing microphone. It just doesn't sound that good Take a moment to make sure you are not speaking Into the wrong side of the microphone where the pickup pattern is not intended to capture your voice. Make sure you're also not Accidentally using it as a uh front address microphone and speaking into the top which is going to sound less good You're going to want to position it carefully using your uh shock mount So that you are using it inside address format I don't I think it can be a little bit off like look if I bring it down a tiny bit This is it full side address, but it does obscure my mouth This is me bringing the microphone down a little bit and my mouth is visible And hopefully the audio pickup isn't that much worse But you just the second thing you want to make doubly sure is that you are speaking into the front of the microphone Not the back of the microphone because this sounds like you know If this is the first time if he's the microphone with the front and the back And you might think oh that doesn't really matter It matters immensely the difference in sound quality. It's pretty big as they hope is going to come through on this video thank you guys for watching if you want to get more videos for me about um Everything I cover on this random miscellany of a youtube channel Ranging from microphones to obs to linux to israel then do consider subscribing Thank you guys for watching and have a very good day