Microphone is the first link in the speech recognition system. Depending on its type and mounting position, the microphone can significantly distort the spectrum and affect the performance of the speech recognition system. In this paper, characteristics of the speech signal for different microphones and microphone distances are investigated both in time and frequency domains. In the time domain analysis, the average signal-to-noise ration is measure ration is measured for the database we collected depending on the microphones and microphone distances. Mel-frequency spectral coefficients and mel-frequency cepstrum are computed to examine the spectral characteristics. Analysis results are discussed with our findings, and the result of recognition experiments is given.