The Arcane Athenæum

Good evening, everyone. I hope you had a fun (and more importantly, SAFE) Independence Day.

I have an important (and sad) an update for you all. I’m working on editing episode 21 right now, and unfortunately the audio quality is what one may call “piss poor.”

You may have seen the picture I shared on our Facebook page a few Fridays ago when we played. Under normal circumstances, we play up in our loft space, which (though it is open to the living room) is still a much more confined space, meaning that we have significantly less reverb to worry about. The trade off is that the confined space makes it is very uncomfortable to play there, and especially since we had *spoilers* another player with us, we needed a larger space.

To that end we moved to the living room, hence the picture. Much larger space, much much more comfortable for all of us to play, but that larger space also means that our audio has a significant amount of reverb. Enough to make the episode almost un-playable. We tried to test the equipment before starting, but clearly this wasn’t enough.

I’ll be honest; I’m not sure where to go with this now. Ideally I’d have everyone mic’ed separately. This is what Critical Role and Matt Colville do. But I simply can’t afford that; not only would I need an audio recorder or mixer, but it would need to be able to handle six different channels. Plus the cost of the six mics. And while I’d love to be able to shell out that cash for the good of the podcast, it’s simply not something I can do.

Which means I need to consider what to do from here. At best, we may find ourselves looking at a Matt Colville method; we play the game and then afterwards we have an episode of me and some of the players discussing the game and what happened. Ideal? No, but it would at least get a more quality product out. And this would be preferable to simply stopping the podcast all together, which I think is the only realistic other option. The recap-method is what we did for the Christmas special, of course, since we had a mechanical failure then. If people liked the Christmas special, and wouldn’t mind the podcast moving in that direction, please comment and let me know. It may be our only option.

Until we figure that out, and unless I can get the audio workable, episode 21 is going to be delayed for a while. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience, everyone. No one is more disappointed than me that things are working out this way.