Boxy Recording

Audacity Help Forum macOS
1

Mac Air Running 10.15.4 Catalina
Audacity 2.4.1
Fully acoustic tiled recording booth.
Rode arm
Yeti Mic

Hi
Long term podcast producer and audiobook narrator / audio commercials.
All of a sudden I’m getting notes back about my recordings saying some are boxy. Not all, just some.
Needless to say I’m doing nothing different to my settings or studio between these jobs, but when I go back some of them DO sound boxy.

Any ideas why this might be or could somebody point me to a tutorial to help me avoid this?

Thanks
Millsoid

2

Headphone-bleed can create a boxy (comb) effect.

3

Hi there
Thanks for that suggestion but I don’t wear my headphones when recording.
Any other bright ideas folks?
:smiley:

4

Increasing your distance from the mic would make the recording more roomy.

Yeti mics have multi-pattern,
changing the sensitivity pattern from cardioid to one of the other settings would record more from the room.

Changing the angle of a laptop screen could reflect sound back to the mic.

5

Macs for the most part leave you alone when you’re trying to produce original content, but Zoom, Skype, Chat and other communications and conferencing apps don’t. The obvious one is leaving Zoom running in the background waiting for a call, but under some conditions, Zoom can actually close and leave the processing running on the recording channel.

Any connection there? If you didn’t change the studio that almost has to be it. Nobody leaves a Mac sitting in an empty studio for days between recordings. They’re always active parts of somebody’s life.

All of a sudden I’m getting notes back about my recordings saying some are boxy

Anything with timing? It always happens on Thursday? This is where terrific bookkeeping is handy. “I shot the ‘Tasty-Freeze’ commercial on Friday, right after the week’s podcast.”

How long are the podcasts? Some podcasts are affected, right? The whole podcast beginning to end?

Can you post five to ten seconds of good and bad? Drag-select a short chunk of sound and File > Export Selected > WAV Microsoft. Scroll down from a forum text window > Attachments > Add Files.

The forum will cut you off if you try to post a long sample.

Koz