Your listener doesn’t care if your hair gets messed up, and the video version is just there to promote the real (audio) podcast.
If you’re recording podcasts remotely (using Zoom, Riverside, SquadCast, or any other online tool), every person speaking on the call needs headphones. No exceptions.
If person A isn’t wearing headphones, every time person B speaks, person A’s mic will pick that up. That’s one of the main reasons people ask you to mute yourself on Zoom or Teams.
Zoom isn’t for podcast recording so it offers echo cancellation. That means when person A interrupts person B, Zoom gets confused and starts trying to deal with the echo, making the resulting audio sound terrible.
If person B is the type of likes to say “hmm” and “yeah” and “right” a lot during a call, person A’s mic is going to pick all of that up, meaning every time person B says “mmm”, we can’t hear what person A says, because the software’s trying to compensate.
When you wear headphones, your mic picks up your voice alone, and not everyone else’s. If you care about the listener experience – or you want your podcast editor to stop yelling at you – you and your guests need to wear headphones.
Good sound quality is the absolute bear minimum listeners should expect. Start making it a core requirement today.