I'm Against Podcasts

On the Mac for example, Garageband comes with a free compressor plugin -- and even EQ presets for "spoken voice" like material.

But you can also find free VST compressors -- you'll then need an audio plugin host. Audacity can do that too.

I like storytelling podcasts for example, so something like "Re:Sound" was great. It is compilation of the best from other sources: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/re-sound/id135072877 (hard to find it actually) This can lead you to a number of podcasts from all over the world.

Critical Role is an amazing very long form podcast of a DnD game: https://critrole.com/ And if you like it, there is another bunch of similar content discoverable by association.

A lot of top-level stuff targets general audience. If that does not appeal to you, keep digging. Possibly treating it the same way you may look for technical information, with specific keywords, exclusion patterns and following the cross-referencing links. Once you hit the niche you like, you can then test different things within that.

I don't think he means they literally have poor sound quality because of a bad microphone. I think he means they sound sterile and without life, they are somehow lifeless. That the majority of Podcasts sound the same, the same monotone narrator, the same perfectly pitched voices delivering lines, etc... I dunno how to describe it but it's why I don't listen to podcasts.

This is probably the best argument I know of for having journalistic 'institutions'. Gellman Amnesia is a real thing, and very hard to solve for any topic where you're not an expert. But if a source manages to provide a predictable level of quality over many stories, it's suddenly possible to use the topics you know as a way to predict the quality of everything else.

Of course, the downside of that is the way it creates confidence that can then be abused, and in particular the risk that everyday accuracy will provide an aegis for misrepresenting topics which people can't fact-check. Functionally, it's something like the SSL chain-of-trust problem; the tradeoff for being able to trust things we can't personally inspect is having a system which propagates any claim that gets past the weakest gatekeeper involved.

I don't think it's very common for journalism orgs to go off the rails completely, and when they do people eventually catch up to the loss of quality. Rather, I worry about trusted names being manipulated to spread stories without showing proper evidence. If you're running Theranos and know actual scientists would laugh at your data, or you're promoting the invasion of Iraq and know no one can challenge your "classified evidence", the name of a trusted news source becomes a welcome road to legitimacy. And instead of convincing a bunch of reputable blogs or analysts who each have their own reputation on the line, you can shop a claim until someone bites and then start using their output to convince further voices.

(There's an interesting debate hidden in there about source anonymity: keeping sources anonymous from other journalists, even after they're proven dishonest, allows them to try out a lie repeatedly without being caught. It's a tough problem.)

As you say, most of my favorite sources are either bloggers or specific writers I trust by name instead of organization. But there's a lot to be said for delinking "knows and writes about a topic" from "has strong verification practices and a reputation to risk"; there are just too many interesting stories to rely on personal reputation for every one of them.