Ringing in the Background of my Recordings

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

I recently purchased a Blue Yeti USB mic, and have had an issue with this high pitched ringing in the background of all my recordings. I have scrolled through endless forums looking for help and advice, I have tried everything I could find; different USB cables, different computers, different USB ports on my computer, a USB hub with it’s own power source, I’ve moved it off my desk and turned off everything in the house I could think of to turn off. Some days the ringing will be louder than others, which leads me to believe that there is some kind of external cause and that it isn’t just a faulty mic, but clearly I am not an expert.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you very much in advance. I’ll attach a sound clip so you can hear what I am talking about. As my bad luck would have it, the sound is softer today, but definitely still there. There is some background noise as well, but that’s not what my issue.

2

It’s interference : the 1000Hz + harmonics from the computer’s power supply , and in your case an additional +/- 120Hz component from the second harmonic of your mains electricity ( 60Hz) …
1000Hz+harmonics, and smaller + & - 120Hz peaks either side.png
There is a fix for the “1000Hz + harmonics” interference using post-processing ,
see this post … https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/help-blue-yeti-high-pitch-noise/31979/12

I’ve applied the code shown in that post to your audio …

Preventing the interference from reaching the USB mic power supply is the best solution, rather than post-production fix. I recently read a post here about a hardware-gadget which does that : filters the interference out … https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/help-blue-yeti-high-pitch-noise/31979/31 : so the the jury is still out on the effectiveness of that device.

3

It’s our old friend Frying Mosquitoes.

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/clips/FryingMosquitoes3.wav

The short answer is no. We had high hopes for a USB filter adapter to go between the microphone and the computer, but that hasn’t been going well. Mine is coming in the post. Flynwill already has his and it hasn’t been particularly effective. We know what the problem is. It’s the USB data transmission getting into the USB battery supply. Flynwill fixed his problem to silence by tearing apart his device and redesigning it. He’s an engineer. They do that.

If you’re not conversant in screwdrivers and other Tools Of Mass Destruction, then I don’t have good news. We tried all those things, too and none of them was perfect. What’s disconcerting is they all changed the problem, but none with any stability and none got rid of it. As you noted. If it’s Monday, the problem isn’t as bad. Programmers call those “moon phase” errors.

For grins, did you call Blue? It would be interesting to hear what they say. They’re kind of in doo-doo (technical term) if they admit that a goodly portion of their highly respected microphones are unusable, and that has been our experience.

Oddly, my clip wasn’t made on a Yeti. I have a cheap, inexpensive sound adapter and that does it, too.

Any time you have a microphone of modest cost integrated directly with USB, you could get it. The larger, more expensive microphones appear to not do it and the higher end sound adapters and sound mixers don’t either. They all have the ability to isolate themselves from anything odd or unstable that the computer does.

The go-to equipment line-up from the ACX videos is an analog (not digital) Rode NT1 microphone connected to a USB Microphone Preamplifier (MicPre), the MBox Mini-2. Only then does the USB system get involved. There was some note about the Mini-2 not being available any more. I don’t remember how that went. I can look.

There are the videos if you haven’t seen them yet.

http://www.acx.com/help/video-lessons-resources/200672590

Also, this is a talk from ACX on audiobook production

http://blog.acx.com/2014/06/26/how-to-succeed-at-audiobook-production-part-1/

You didn’t say you were trying to prepare submissions for audiobook, but many other people are, and that whine can keep you from achieving ACX technical compliance.

Koz