Recording quality of remote guests on podcasts

Zencastr is great. It makes a local audio recording on their side, which is better than you recording what comes over the wire.

As for mics, I recommend getting a good one for yourself, but it's a lot of work to ship your guests mics. I'd say only about 25% of IH podcast guests have a nice mic, and the rest are using Airpods, headsets, laptop mics, etc.

The most important thing is that they wear headphones, so their mic won't pick up the sound of your voice coming out of their speakers.

Zencastr is good, but SquadCast is great. They've done a really good job of eliminating a thing called audio drift, where your computer and your guest's are slightly out of sync. Over the course of a long interview the lag can be as much as a second or more.

As for mics, yep, external mics are the best way to ensure good sound, too.

Always use external microphones.

Audio quality is very important, multiple studies have concluded the better something sounds (movie, video, podcast, ect) the more likely people will view you as a professional & believe what you say! :)

Check out this article

https://news.usc.edu/141042/why-we-believe-something-audio-sound-quality/

1. Skype works great for me, new versions have a call record function which records on the cloud. Generally all my guests have Skype account, so I dont have to tell them to sign up to another tool.

2. I highly recommend guests to use external microphones or earphones, instead of internal/inbuilt mic in the laptop / phone. The internal ones lead to echo and bleed through of sound, which makes audio quality really terrible.
   The guests might not have a high end mic, but they generally do have a pair of earphones (wired or bluetooth) with inbuilt mic, which still gives decent output quality.