Crackling on Samson Meteor since firmware update

Special Interest Groups Audiobook Production
1

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!

2

Koz will give you much better help, but in the low volume recording, it sounds a little like noise-gate clipping to me.
In the high volume recording, the noise floor seems pretty high in the first half-second, but the volume is high enough that the gate never causes the clipping.
Novice guesswork, here, but trying to give you something to go on until the professionals get here.

3

Koz will give you much better help

Sure. Here it comes.

It sounds a little like noise gate clipping to me.

I bet if you dig into your Meteor software, you’re going to find settings to help you create a conference or chat. Auto Noise Reduction, etc. Turn all those off.

Entertainment reading and Conference/Chat are very different

The audiobook goal is listening to someone sitting at the table across from you on a sunny morning telling you a fascinating story with no distractions over cups of tea.

Conference/Chat wants to shoot your words to others no matter what it has to do to get them there, and whether or not you or they have a quiet room. That’s the Earthmover or Howitzer version of recording.

ACX has a failure called “Overprocessing.” It’s in the second step, after the automation when an actual human listens to the work.

Koz