Hey Guys,
First time poster and I hope you can help me out with an issue I am having.
I am an audiobook narrator that uses a Samson Meteor mic, the latest Audacity build and Windows 10. I have a new desktop machine with a Sound Blaster Z soundcard.
I read somewhere about Samson’s sound deck software and thought the real-time noise reduction that comes with it sounded pretty cool, so I installed this. This brought to my attention that my Samson mic wasn’t registering as a Samson mic and just as generic microphone in Windows/Audacity, and this led me to implement a firmware fix - and now Windows recognises it as a Samson mic. This has brought problems.
There’s now a persistent crackle on my recordings that wasn’t there before the firmware fix and some of the audio is breaking up really badly. I looked into this and most of the information seemed to suggest that this was as a result of the mic being overloaded and to turn down the input volume, but this is where is gets weird (to my mind, anyway) - I used to have my recording volume set very low at around 2 before the firmware fix, but the crackling is much worse at low volumes. If I turn the recording volume up to around 8, the crackling is much reduced, but not entirely.
I’ve included two files - one at a low recording volume which in addition to the crackling is breaking up badly and unusable, and another at high volume which is much better, but not perfect.
Any ideas? I would much prefer to record at low volumes and then normalize to reduce background noise, etc. If it’s a case of uninstalling the firmware and just using it as a generic mic again that’s ok, but I do not know how to do this.
Thank you in advance!