Hello, I am a newbie and clueless about anything having to do with audio. But I wrote a book, published it through Amazon, and thought I’d try making an audiobook of it.
And nothing seems to be going right!
My #1 problem is the hum that’s always in the background, consistently, no matter what I try.
I started out in one room with my son’s huge gaming PC which makes a lot of noise. Then I moved the gaming PC into a closet. Everything sounded a lot quieter to me then but the same hum was still there on test recordings.
Then I bought a Mac Mini - noise still there.
I then took all electronics out of the room, even took off my Fitbit wristwatch. (Other gear: NT1-A microphone hung on one of those arm things and UR12 audio interface.)
Hum still the same with Mac Mini so I moved everything to another room. Same hum. Tried hanging up blankets in front of and then in back of mic. Same hum.
My sound floor is never, never lower than -42 db. This is with input gain knob on UR12 turned up all the way because, if I start to turn it down, my “testing 123” becomes too low very quickly.
It seems to be the low-hertz, ground loop type of noise that everyone talks about.
The only equipment I still have left to put up is the foam type stuff for deadening sound, but I don’t want to buy and put that up because I won’t be able to return it if I have to give up this project, and I don’t have any reason to think foam will help the hum. It’s in the electrical lines, probably, right?
I got so frustrated yesterday, trying to deal with not only the hum, but also the changeover from PC to Mac and other such problems, that I disassembled everything and put all the gear back in their original boxes for return. But today I’m reconsidering. I don’t want to be cowardly and give up. And I haven’t been patiently and carefully eliminating noise sources one-by-one, so I may have missed something.
I also haven’t tried one of those noise eliminator boxes yet.
So I thought I’d ask:
Should I just ignore the hum for now and soldier on? My son suggests I just do the high-pass thing - he knows how to do this himself and can show me - and suggests I just deal with the hum that way and not worry so much about it.
Or should I continue to work on eliminating the hum before I go any farther?
Or am I not projecting into the microphone properly, and failing to turn down gain as much as I should?
Or something else?
It’s discouraging because I read of so many people who have noise floor problems and then just “hang up some curtains and throw a rug down” and get great quality audio.
My son and husband are actually engineers (mechanical) so they can help me with some of the electrical stuff but they don’t have a lot of time to troubleshoot, especially since they don’t believe the hum is a big problem.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.