The Wrong Reasons to Book a Podcast Studio — and the Right Ones

Someone asked me last week what a studio gives you that a good microphone doesn't.

It's a fair question, and the honest answer is: less than most studios would like you to believe, and more than you'd expect — just not in the places people usually look.

So here are the reasons people give us for booking. Some of them aren't very good.

"I need better sound"

You might not need us for that.

A decent mic, a quiet room, something soft on the walls, and a bit of care will get you a long way. The gap between that and a proper rig is real, but if audio is your only problem, it's a cheaper problem than a studio booking. I'd rather tell you that than take the money.

Where it does start to matter is the moment there's more than one of you in the room, or someone dialling in from elsewhere. Then you're not fighting noise, you're fighting bleed — everyone's voice in everyone's microphone, and no way to fix one without wrecking another. We record every mic and every remote guest as its own channel, up to fourteen of them, alongside a stereo mix. That's the bit you can't retrofit afterwards. Once it's recorded as one blob, it stays one blob.

"It looks more professional"

This one's true, but it's vague, and vague reasons make for bad decisions.

Here's the specific version: video is the part you can't quietly get away with. Listeners are forgiving about audio in a way viewers are never forgiving about pictures. A slightly boxy room sounds fine. A slightly wrong-looking frame reads as amateur in about a second and a half, and nobody can tell you why.

Lighting, camera height, the thing behind your head — that's what people are actually judging. It's also the thing that's genuinely hard to do at home, because it isn't one purchase. It's a room.

The reasons that actually hold up

Three cameras, cut properly. One camera is a webcam with ambition. The value of a multi-camera set-up isn't the extra angles in themselves, it's that a conversation becomes editable — you can cut to the person reacting, not only the person talking. That is most of the difference between something that feels like a show and something that feels like a Zoom call.

You can change your mind about the set. Ours are virtual — 3D environments rather than furniture. That sounds like a technicality until you need to move a recording forward by a day, or swap a logo an hour before you start, and there's nothing to physically build, light or paint. I've written about the time that saved us, when a booking landed a day earlier than we thought and it turned out not to matter at all.

You leave with it done. This is the one I'd actually lead with.

The studio hour isn't the expensive part of a podcast. The expensive part is the fortnight afterwards, where nobody has edited it and the episode quietly doesn't go out.

You won't be handing us files, because we're the ones recording — three camera angles, every microphone on its own channel, all of it landing in our system as you go. Which means the edit doesn't start when you send us something. It starts before you've got your coat on.

A cut episode and your vertical clips come back by the next working day. If yours isn't the last session of the day, there's a good chance you'll have them the same evening.

That's not us being heroic about it. We rebuilt how the edit gets done, and it keeps getting quicker.

There's a room, and people in it. We can seat an audience. If your show is better with a crowd, that isn't something you can improvise in a spare bedroom.

The awkward requests are already solved. This is the unglamorous one, and it's the reason people rebook. A remote guest who needs to appear on screen rather than down a phone line. A producer in another city who needs to hear the session live and talk back to the presenter. A comfort monitor in the presenter's eyeline for talking points. A teleprompter. A live stream going out to YouTube while you record. None of those are exotic — but every one of them is a small technical project if you're doing it yourself, and none of them is on the day you find out you need it. Here they're a checkbox at booking, with a price next to it.

When you shouldn't book a studio

Genuinely: if you're solo, audio-only, still working out what your show is, and recording weekly — stay at home. Buy a decent mic. Get twenty episodes done. Find out whether you actually like doing it.

Studios are worth it when the show has a shape, when there's more than one person, when it needs to be watched as well as heard, or when the edit has become the thing that stops episodes going out. Before that, we'd just be an expensive way to procrastinate.

What it costs

£200 an hour, ex VAT, for sessions up to three hours. That's the room, the cameras, the mics and someone running it.

Editing is priced per episode rather than bundled, so you only buy the bit you need: a straightforward cut of the conversation at £200, or a full build with titles, music and graphics at £500. Social clips are a separate £200 — one long-form cut or up to five verticals, captioned and ready to post.

Then there's the list of things that turn out to matter on the day: a remote guest on video (£200) or audio (£100), a teleprompter (£100), a comfort monitor (£50), a producer watching remotely (£50) or watching and talking back to the floor (£200), a studio producer sitting in with you (£100), a live stream to YouTube or TikTok (£150). Multi-channel audio — every mic and every remote guest on its own track, up to fourteen — costs nothing. Neither does recording to our drives, or a week of full-resolution backup.

If you're streaming live, a live line cut (£150) gets you a properly mixed multi-camera output going out as it happens. That's what it's for now — with the edit turned round as fast as it is, cutting live purely to save time in post isn't really the trade it used to be.

Block bookings of ten hours or more are discounted, and there's a points-based loyalty and referral scheme.

We're at 75 Dean Street in Soho, 10am to 6pm Monday to Friday, with the last one-hour session starting at 5pm. Outside those hours is usually possible — it just costs a bit more, so ask.

So — do you need a studio?

Maybe not yet. That's a strange thing for a studio to say, and I'd rather say it than have you book a session you weren't ready for and conclude the whole thing wasn't worth it.

But if you've got a show that people are meant to watch, more than one voice in the room, and a backlog of episodes nobody's edited — that's not a microphone problem. That's the one we're actually for.

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