Glossary
What is gain staging?
Setting the level sensibly at every step — microphone, recorder, edit, export — so nothing is so quiet it picks up hiss or so loud it clips. Get it roughly right at the start and every later step gets easier.
Every stage of a chain has a comfortable range. Too quiet and you amplify the noise floor along with the voice later; too loud and you clip. Gain staging is the unglamorous habit of keeping each stage in its range instead of fixing everything at the end.
For a podcast it comes down to two decisions. Set the mic gain so normal speech peaks around −6 dB, and resist making it louder because the meter looks lonely. Then leave the finished loudness to the export, where it is measured against a target rather than guessed.
That is why Cast asks for a platform at export rather than a volume: the whole episode is measured and matched in one pass, which works properly only if the recording underneath it was neither clipped nor buried in noise.
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