As a podcaster, the sound of your voice represents you to the world. Yes, your content matters, but your standards are represented by the quality of your audio. Clear, clean sound invites your listeners to stay and listen to you; tinny, muffled, or distorted sound can annoy your listeners and drive them away. The microphone you select is the first step in presenting your audio persona. Do you want top notch sound for your listeners? Sure, you do! Here is a microphone which will capture your voice in digital HD quality and in the format suitable for modern studio production techniques.
The Shure MV7, manufactured by Shure Corporation, is known for its clean sound and excellent build quality. As a podcaster or field recording professional, you will like its broad, flat frequency response and ability to accurately capture voices in a cardioid pattern, single channel mode. The sound is clean and natural, capturing the band of audio spectrum suited to the human voice, beginning to roll off below 70 to 80 hz and above about 15000 hz, as shown in the manufacturer published response curve. Listening to a recording made on an Shure MV7 is almost like "being there in person."
There is a headset output, providing a source for zero latency monitoring. There are other useful features if you need them: equalization, limiting, and compression. My suggestion with regard to these is to keep your audio clean and flat for recording and do your EQ and other processing in post production.
An important specification, besides sensitivity, distortion, or frequency response, is the Shure MV7 digital output format: up to 24 bit resolution at 48000 samples per second. Be aware that modern studios will probably want audio in at least a 24 bit / 96000 sps format. You can get that, or even higher sampling rates, such as 192000 sps, by feeding raw audio from the Shure MV7 XLR output into your own Analog to digital Converter (ADC). Such bit depth and rates are important for keeping processing artifacts to a minimum and having a high quality archive for future use. With 24/96k (or better) audio, you can do the noise reduction, EQ, and dynamics processing with confidence that the DSP will not add audible grunge to your voice or music content.