Faron had the better quality.

Here I just did this little audio thing for you.

Read a review for a game for a few seconds and recorded it 3 different ways.
http://soundcloud.com/ck64/sets/audio-recording-1

The first is just using my headset with nothing done to it, raw recording. This is what your (Steve) voice sort of sounds like in the review.
The second is the same recording using the free program audacity to cut out some of the hiss with the noise removal tool.

Sounds a lot better! There are other audio errors with the recording but the noise removal helps a lot.

The third is a recording with my portable TASCAM recorder. I was sitting a little to close to it so it sounds kind of echo-y. Its my voice resonating with the mic/plastic. No edits were done but I had to boost the hell out of it with audacity. Still, it sounds pretty good especially compared to the first recording.

The forth and final recording is using a Shure SM57 and its raw with the gain on my preamp turned up to about 60%. No editing in audacity.



So as you can see there are a lot of ways to improve the audio be it by hardware or software.

__________________