a question for people who listen to podcasts, interviews, etc.

how big a problem is audio quality? do you often find podcasts have shitty audio for the guests? mismatched audio levels, etc? ie: one guy is loud, the other is quiet, or the host has a great full-range mic, and the guest is using skype and there's no high-end/treble, just muffled sound?

I don't listen to many, but most I have heard are like that, UNLESS they are in the same studio.

The ones I listen to do not have this problem... at least not very often. I only listen to Whiskey Media podcasts (Tested, Screened, GiantBomb) and they seem to know how to control their audio equipment... every now and then it clips slightly when someone is shouting, but it doesn't bother me all that much.

128 kbps or gtfo

yep, as said by others, generally the quality of the podcast depends on the people doing it and their situation.

I know a couple of guys who conduct their podcast live (talking to each other via Skype / Google Hangouts due to being in different countries) by streaming it via icecast and ustream. While the live broadcast is happening, they both record their own audio coming in from their mics and then merge these recordings together and get levels right, etc.

so the live broadcast can occasionally sound a bit ropey, but if you download the 'mastered' one it's fine.

I also listen to The Verge podcast, which generally has very good audio but sometimes has it's off days (a few times someone hasn't really been on the ball with the compression/gating).

As long as I can hear the conversation fairly clearly, I don't care much for the quality or kbps etc. It's not like I'm going to listen to it again and is almost always deleted soon afterwards.

putting together a decent podcast recording especially when doing guests over skype, sometimes takes a lot of post production work to get it near broadcast quality. I do a podcast for mediaroots.org and a few of our episodes with guests unfortunately we ha to work with what we had, ie: the guest on a poor quality cellphone network . One of my favorite podcasts is the Dan Savage 'Savagelove cast' and it has terrible audio quality.

yeah i notice this sometimes but its a podcast so who gives a fuck

i'm with awkward, intelligibility (sp?) is the key thing.

however, bad audio-fidelity in speech can really annoy me cos usually speech is not THAT hard to record :(