Challenge Accepted

 During the height of lockdown I was working from home, I was bored and I was making a lot of video calls. I came to find it rude when the people I had to talk to had crappy audio on their computers and they had a lot of hum/buzz/echo/background noise or were hard to understand. During one meeting I said to my colleagues how much I liked talking to the gamers because they always have really good headsets. One of these guys explained that he was just wearing headphones as he didn't like a head-worn mic. From just outside frame he pulled a massive (presumable broadcast quality) mic on an anglepoise stand.

I used to run sound for various bands and have enough audio equipment scattered around the house to put on a small music festival. I said "Challenge accepted" and spent the night putting together a system of stands, mic and headphones that would look equally impressive for my meetings the next day.

These two flight cases contained most of what I needed.

This is a battery powered mic preamp to bring the level up to something that the computer could deal with. I didn't have enough space to use an actual mixing desk.

This is what I was talking on for my meetings the next day. The mic is actually a bass drum mic, but it deals with speech and (tenor) vocals very well. It's in a stand that's designed for the stage so it's far to heavy and sturdy to be convenient. The headphones, while excellent are also ear defenders so it is quite oppressive to put them on

Richard "telephony" B