This is the 3rd episode I’ve recorded and the previous 2 havent sounded this bad.
I’'m using Audacity v2.4.2
Discord to talk on
OBS Studio v 25.0.8
I have Razer 7.1 Surround Sound on as default and I’m not sure if this is why the other two ppl talking in this clip sound so echoy. I’ve tried fiddling with normalization, sound reduction, distortion, compression and maybe others. Any help or guidance as to how I could ge the other 2 voices sounding more reasonable like mine if possible on Audacity please.
Mary? Maren? The woman at the end has upstream data problems. That’s the rapidly repeating buzz-saw sound. A lot of home internet connections are aggressively non-symmetrical. Download has to handle multiple high-def movies, Youtube, and the New York Times while upload only has to handle the [Enter] key. This becomes a serous problem when the data is the same density both directions. All the people newly on Zoom because of the sickness are discovering this.
The second man speaking is rushing his microphone. He has his face jammed straight up against the microphone and his voice is splattering and muffled. Directional microphones are particularly bad at this. It’s call proximity effect. He should back off a little. That bassy whomping sound should go away. If his voice vanishes when he does that, he can try oblique positioning (B).
Those “ghost” voices in the background are caused by not enough headphones. That’s multiple delayed room echoes building on each other. Everyone should be wearing headphones to hear the others. There is a “Zoom” news briefing aired in Los Angeles with multiple actual newsroom people giving very brief reports on their tasks. The people wearing headphones or earbuds are clear and clean. The people depending on software echo cancellation all sound like they’re in a bathtub.
You can apply fancy software tricks after you get the simple problems fixed. There is no applying echo and filters to solve microphone problems.
If you know you’re not going to speak for a while, mute your microphone. That helps keep sound trash off the show.
The more your room is soundproofed, the better you will sound. The people in crowded offices or dens with bookcases make out well here. Piles of books or papers don’t reflect sound. Minimalism and polished wooden floors are not welcome.
It would be hideously difficult to shoot good sound here.
Technology can help a little. You can wear a headset with headphones and microphone in one.
That’s how I did it for my tests. There is a podcast I like that has terrific sound and I couldn’t sort how he was doing it. One day he admitted he had a shotgun microphone pointed at him just out of camera range.
