Hi forum.
Thank you in advance for maybe (possibly) helping me. I’m in a bit of a panic.
I’m an audiobook narrator, on my 14th book. I have used the same microphone (Blue Snowball), the same computer (MacBook) and same DAW (Audacity, obviously) since I began recording. I have improved my recording spaces from an open bedroom with virtually no safeguards in place, to an empty office in a commercial building, to an insulated closet alcove, to what I’m trying to work in now: a 4"x3" makeshift home booth insulated with blankets, foam with a homemade mudguard.
My sound quality and noise floor is getting WORSE and I can’t understand why. After moving into a space that is smaller and more insulated, I am devastated that I’m putting out poorer sounding audio. I don’t know how to fix it.
The steps I currently take are these:
- Record the audio in my booth space.
- Edit.
- Master the audio, using a combination of the limiter, compressor, and amplification/normalization to bring up the volume to required specs.
This leaves me with an excessive amount of hiss which I cannot remove without severely damaging the rest of the audio. After I sufficiently get the hiss out via Noise Reduction, my voice ends up sounding like I’m inside a tunnel. I’m absolutely astonished that this is happening, and am in a panic because I just began a project, and have at least 2 more lined up. I don’t feel like I can continue putting out audio with these poor results.
I completely get that I’m using a lower quality microphone, and should upgrade. But I don’t understand how the quality is getting worse if everything I’m using has stayed the same, and my recording space should (in theory) be better than before. All my research suggests that hiss is not an indicator that a microphone is failing. Am I wrong? Is my mic the problem?
I have attached some audio. When I normalize to -3.2 in order to bring the levels between -18 and -23, I get the intense hiss in the second sample.
Thanks in advance for any info you can provide.
mastered audacity sample.aup (1.23 KB)
audacity sample.aup (1.38 KB)