The sure sm58 is a beast. You always get it often very cheap used. It is almost indestructible. You could park a tank on it. Heavily used at live gigs. You can buy it used without worries
Discussion
The SM58 was a shitty mic when it came out and still is today. It’s popularity comes purely from price and reliability.
No self respecting audio engineer would ever use it to record anything.
If you need a mic for podcasting, go with a USB condenser mic. Decent ones starting at 50 bucks.
I do 😅
Well, maybe you should start respecting yourself 🤷
Seriously.
The benefit of the SM58 is that you can throw it with 50 others loosely in a box, ship it around the planet and then throw a full stack turned to 11 at it.
The sound quality is really awful.
It doesn’t matter for its use case, because it’s meant for garage bands and touring, where usually it’s the pa and the acoustics that screws up the sound more badly than the mic can.
But for recording you can get better stuff cheaper.
Thanks for the hint. I am pretty satisfied with the results tho and even do audiobook recordings with it 😅🙏
You do you 🤷
In my case the issue with the audiobooks is my voice… mic doesn’t help with that unfortunately
But seriously, try a large membrane condenser one day, you’ll be blown away by the difference.
Dynamic mics where design to handle extreme stage situations, not for the studio.
Unfortunately i life in a very noisy place and condenser mics pick up all that stuff. The sm58 does a great job of only picking up my voice