When it comes to your podcast, making your audio as good as it can be ensures the listener experience is the best it can be as well. So this means making sure the levels are fine and you've not got a lot of background noise, etc. Now normally if you do have issues like that, you can fix it in post production when you're editing. But there's also a great three tool from Adobe called Mic Check that helps you check your settings before you actually start recording.
And there are four settings it'll check. So it'll check distance to microphone, the gain, the background noise, and echo. So with the distance to microphone, it will tell you if you're too close or too far, while the gain test will tell you if you're too loud or too quiet. The background noise test will let you know if there's other noise apart from your voice being picked up, and echo will show if there's reverb coming through on your microphone.
Normally this happens if you're in a room with a lot of hard surfaces, so if you see a lot of echo and you don't have your room treated, just move a little bit closer to the mic and that will help remove some of the background echo on your record. And I'll leave a link to Adobe's Mic Check in the show notes, so be sure to check them out. Until the next time, happy podcasting.