Allen Furmanski — Director of Marketing for Citrix Systems and host of The Click-Down technical podcast — explains the importance of strong communication systems and why clear audio is crucial for every corporate environment.

As a large, industry-leading company, people expect our content to be polished. Perception is reality and what we deliver from the marketing side needs to be at the same level of quality as our world-class products. If we don’t deliver, our competition will. Plus bad publicity due to poor audio quality would travel fast across social media. 

In The Click-Down, our company podcast, we cover a variety of technical topics pertaining to IT solutions including DaaS, VDI, networking, security, and more. Like most podcasts, it is audio-only so high-quality audio is incredibly important to retain and grow our listening base. 

Since most of our guests tend to be remote, we use an online capture platform. It records to local files that I will then process in a DAW and upload to a hosting service. We encourage our guests to find a quiet room for recording, utilize the best hardware available, microphone techniques, etc. Inevitably there’s always some challenges along the way and post-processing to be done. 

My team and I also produce technical webinars, YouTube videos and live product demos. The focus is in the enterprise business space and we regularly work with some of the world’s largest organizations.

When it comes to ensuring that you sound your best, take your time and do your research. Understand what your current challenges are by critically listening to your work and having others listen to it as well. Room acoustics is very important as is mic placement and setting your levels. 

Always strive to record, edit, and post later as opposed to streaming live which is more challenging and less forgiving. And when it comes to microphones, you can’t go wrong with anything that Earthworks makes!

In 2021, when researching for my next spoken-word microphone I came across an enthusiast site highly recommending the Earthworks ETHOS. Having never tried it before, I ordered one and haven’t looked back. It’s my current go-to mic for most of the work that I do in my home office. On the go, I use an Earthworks ICON USB mic which is incredibly rich and detailed for a USB mic. 

The well-engineered products are made in the USA with incredible build quality, and the customer service is also excellent. They are responsive to your needs and genuinely want to help you be successful with your audio projects.