Re: Need guidance on quality and equipment
 

I've been listening to all the recordings as they come in, and for my ears, demboom.wav is perfectly listenable, and sounds OK.

A few things concern me in the process. Having sat behind the glass for many recording sessions, one of the biggest problems comes from matching end of day 1 recordings with start of day 2. In difficult spaces, mouth to mic distance changes make massive differences.

The popular voice over mics in good voice rooms tend to be placed a little further away, and the room's acoustics make this perfectly doable. This also makes session to session matching much easier.

For VO artistes who work from home permanently, repeatable acoustics are vital. From the recordings I suspect you are working a little close - for practical reasons and 10mm can be critical to enable matching. I also wonder about your processing. It's very common for newcomers to recording to not get the capture right, then spend ages trying to fix it. The professional voice over artistes rarely tweak or process their audio at all. They sit down, press record and the little template they use adds their preset treatment and that gets sent off. Their headphones are of sufficient quality that any errors or problems can be heard.

I've done a fair few products for visually impaired folk - and once you get the physical setup sorted and made repeatable, the speed of recording can be pretty impressive. Few pops to edit, the occasional clonk where something gets kicked - that kind of thing.

The rise in podcasting seemed to generate new microphones, and I don't quite understand why? I suppose cost, and USB connectivity (in my humble view, not remotely a positive feature).

A modest audio interface and one of the budget condensers create capture equipment usually better than the 'new' products labelled ideal for podcasting - when inside is a very standard dirt cheap electret element that will change timbre between batches. I wonder if a manufacturer buys 5000 elements from China, and when they run low, they buy another 5000 that are physically the same size, but perhaps are a totally different product. Happens all the time with LED lighting that I also import. I buy 20, they're great. Order another 20 to discover they look different!

Buy Shure, AKG, Sennheiser, or the German products and a twenty year old one sounds the same as a new one.

That last recording for me is perfectly workable. Perhaps a little gentle and repeatable EQ, and some light compression, again - repeatable, and you're done.

EDIT - blind cheap mic shootout.
This just arrived in my inbox, quite interesting.

Re: Need guidance on quality and equipment
 

Hi Paul, thanks for the input. A couple of under desk tweaks mean the mic is fixed distance from the wall and I am leaning in a comfy position to do a two hour read. My ideal is no tweaks, but I need to use the noise reduction and knock off a little bass. I’d guess 2 inch from pop filter and 6 inch from mic.

I think I now have a repeatable formula, but this is the skill building I now need. As this is non fiction, then no voices to keep track of.

I have decided to press forward to get all of the chapters done and then loop back to the beginning to fix the first few sections. Hopefully by the end, I will have a routine. I hope to have my first stable files ready to go by the weekend, depending on wife’s clatter schedule.

I am not going to change the mic, regardless of how tempting the gadgets are. Until, maybe the second book.

But I am actually happy with what I am cutting at the moment.

Re: Need guidance on quality and equipment
 

I can remember when that meant something entirely different.

Re: Need guidance on quality and equipment
 

Oh no! Two nations divided by a common language! Certain words and phrases can do this.

I confess crawling into my duvet fort does feel like regression/ escaping our current situation. Hope we all have a life after covid!

Re: Need guidance on quality and equipment
 

Maybe now is the time to buy stock in a mask-making company.

Re: Need guidance on quality and equipment
 

A little hijacking...that porta booth box has me wondering how well it works at I occasionally record vocals for songs (non professionally), and doing some voice roles for a friend's project (think old narrative radio shows).

Right now I use a "booth" made of doubled up moving blankets hung on stands, and a blanket on the floor. Lately I've been doing a triangle shape...I only have enough for three "walls" and the floor.

It's terrible room...square (mostly), hard tile floors. No carpet in the entire place. Results are okay to my ears, though you can hear some room. Honestly the voice roles sound very clean to me, but singing excites enough room sound so that it makes it in and washes out the voice a little.

I have not tried the closet, also in same room. Wondering how that would work if I threw those blankets over the exposed surfaces, one over the inside of the door, closed door during takes. Hmmmmmmmm.

Re: Need guidance on quality and equipment
 

I made something v close to porta booth. It did give an incremental improvement, but once I built the under desk space, it actually added its own ‘flavour’. In closet was probably the best, ‘quick’ fix. And I tried to work it, but reading a book is around 8-12 hours recording I find best done in 1-2 hour sessions. Not viable crouched where this was. I guessed if I moved the closet to the other room, the problems would come back.
If it had been short pieces, I would have gone with the closet option.

The final under desk set up is speaking straight at the duvet. It takes me 5-10 minutes to set up. There are samples posted on this thread showing the different configs.

Guys on here were amazing.

Re: Need guidance on quality and equipment
 

Eric, glad to hear you're making good progress.

Unless you use a huge amount of absorption, the low frequencies will penetrate the blankets, bounce off the walls, back through the blankets, and back to your mic. So you can possibly have low frequency standing waves in the room. You want to locate yourself (and mic) to minimize that problem. Consider the floor plan of your room to have an X axis and a Y axis (ignoring the height). Avoid locating yourself at the midpoint of either axis! A better location would be closer to (but not exactly) 1/3 to 1/4 the dimension of the room, and different for the two different axes. In theory you will always have some standing waves but avoiding the dimensional midpoints, and avoiding symmetry, will reduce the worst of them.

This is why the "under desk" setup adds "flavour" to your recordings. Low frequencies are penetrating the blankets, bouncing off the hard panels of the desk, thence back through the blankets to the mic. Depending on the dimensions, this will create peaks and dips in the frequency response. If the desk panels are thin, your voice may even excite some panel resonance which will tend to emphasize those frequencies.

Also remember that you need treatment behind you. The mic is pointed at your head. The mic's most sensitive direction therefore extends past either side of your head to the area behind you. (Whereas the mic's least sensitive direction is 180 degrees away from that, the rear side of the mic's central axis.) It seems to me that portable mini baffles completely ignore this fact.

Look at the photo in post #33. If the talent were in that shot, they would be to the viewer's left of the mic, and would be blocking your view of the laptop. The mic is aimed toward the left edge of the photo, which is actually inside a wide, shallow closet (doors removed) behind the talent. The clothes rod is draped with double-layer thick quilts extending down to the floor; the shelf above the rod is full of pillows and blankets. The area behind the talent, i.e. directly in front of the mic, is as dead as possible.

Re: Need guidance on quality and equipment
 

I've been following this thread with great interest, some really useful info and great help - rather than hijack the thread I'll start another - I'm also in need of a few critical ears