A lot of it is just "is the can the string is attached to 3" from the speaker or 3'?"

A mediocre mic placed 3-6" from the mouth is going to almost always sound better than any price of mic placed 5' away, except in sound treated studios with excellent technique and strong post-processing.

“ means inches and ‘ means feet in case anyone else needs to know because I had to look this up

Thanks, I thought it was an odd quote.

Is this just a US thing? I thought this was common knowledge.

It’s (mostly) just a US thing to measure in feet and inches, so most people don’t learn the shorthand for feet and inches.

> Is this just a US thing? I thought this was common knowledge.

Have you seen the movie This Is Spinal Tap? Good scene on this "common knowledge":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg5Ovdu6bOE

eh, it depends.

i'm not an audiophile either, but some videos really had audio that was terrible enough to make me quit that.

examples: some buzzing in the background, high-pitched noise in one of the channels, or audio in mono (you only hear the person talking from the right ear, for example).

This video has pretty good environmental examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUb9kIwHfoE

This one has a good example of bad vocal audio (at 1:00): https://youtu.be/-PLMiA18tBc?t=60

Audio is only as good as its weakest link. recording, compress to youtube, compress by youtube, playback. I guess it is possible to not be repulsed by audio compression artefacts and judging from the average video posted by mobile <slur>s it is shocking common.