Shure SM48 microphones

These mics are rugged.  You can roll them down a flight of stairs and they might still work. That was important to us when shopping for mics since these are the same mics we use on the road.  They get stuffed into backpacks and jostled around a lot.

The best part is that they're cheap and they sound really good. The SM58 is the industry standard for gigging musicians but these are just as good and about half the price.

Focusrite Scarlett 18i8

Our mixer & interface is one of the most important components in our setup. All of our audio runs through this thing at some point and if it doesn't sound great there's no fixing it in post. It's the component that takes the audio from everything and runs it into the computer for capture.

After we had a couple Behringer mixers die on us, we decided to spend a bit more money and upgrade to a higher-end interface. What we lost in features (inputs / outputs, compression, etc.) we gained in pristine audio quality. Compared to this thing, the Behringer was a noisy piece of crap. After swapping it out, I no longer had to run any noise reduction or other cleanup effects on the final tracks, which saved me time and effort. Of course, we did lose our hardware compression for live shows but that was a minor, and easily fixable, problem.

Now that I've used it for a few months, I don't know that I'd recommend the Scarlett 18i8 for all uses. If you want to run your sources out of the 18i8 and back in, it's not easy. There are plenty of inputs but no real source ouputs other than L/R Monitors. So it's not great for live audio where you need EQ / compression but that's not really what it's intended for. For our recording purposes, it's a great unit.

Behringer MicroAmp HA400

Having 3 people in the studio for our gaming videos means there are at least 3 brands of headphones, and not even always the same 3. So when my headphones are at a reasonable volume, A.Ron's are way too loud and Cecily's are way too quiet.

This headphone amp has 4 outputs, each with its own volume control knob. That lets us adjust the volume so it's comfortable for everyone. We could have gone out and bought 3 identical pairs of headphones but we're podcasters. Money isn't exactly our most plentiful resource.

Nikon D3200 DSLR Camera

We bought a few of these DSLR cameras thinking we'd be able to use them to record in our studio. Unfortunately, they had a limited record time which doesn't work for our long-form content. Instead, we're using them to take really great pictures of our studio, conventions we go to and any video shoots that don't run longer than 20 minutes per shot.

Logitech C920 Webcam

After the Nikon debacle, we decided to go with hardware designed explicitly for long recording sessions. These are great webcams but they don't look nearly as good as our DSLR setup did. They do give us the long record times though.

We also tried a C930e webcam. It's designed for enterprise video calls, does its own encoding and produces a higher quality image than the C920 does but the drivers are nowhere near good enough yet.

ASUS VG236H

I've had this monitor for ages. It got coopted into Bald Move when we setup our video studio. It supports 3D just in case I ever go back to that old gaming gimmick.

I'm sure there are a lot better monitors out there now for the price of this thing.

Kinivo 301BN HDMI Switch

The switch lets us have both of our computers routed to a single video source so that we can switch back and forth between them. This gets used a lot to show ridiculous pictures on the monitor while we record podcasts. It also enables us to output either one of our desktops to the video stream.

HDMI Audio Extractor

The audio extractor gets between the switch and the El Gato so we can pump gameplay audio directly through our board, sending it out to our headphones in the process. It also allows us to play music on the studio speakers while we work.

El Gato

This is our HDMI capture device. I really feel like we're living on the edge with this thing. There's not much weight to it and it's one of the most crucial pieces of our video setup. It also seems pretty picky about what it will and won't accept as a video signal. That said, it does work. So far so good.