Before you do any building-work, check it isn’t sound leaking from the headphones which is responsible for the problem.
On your “smcompton sample.wav” the effect monetarily gets worse when you say “pretty new”.
If the problem was due to reflections from the room it should be quite constant.
If it’s due to sound leaking from the headphones it will get worse if you moved closer to the microphone, ( or even turned your head ) .
awesome, where did you get your blankets?
Some packing company in Los Angeles. Fair Warning, mine came with fire retardant, so I had to leave them outside in the sun for a while.
Koz
if it is sound leaking from the headphones, is there a fix for that, short of getting a higher quality set of them?
The big over-ear type, where there is a thick ring of padding to stop the sound leaking out …
and/or turn the headphone volume down as low as possible, or just don’t use headphones while recording.
Ok. Do most people use headphones while recording? I guess I could just wait to use them till the editing phase. It seems like all the pics I’ve seen and whatnot the people in the booth reading are wearing them.
Also, how did you pull up that graph to visualize the sub-sonic noise? I’d like to run a few tests.
The purple lumpy thing is Analyze > Plot Spectrum.
“Size” setting increase causes the detail (sharpness/accuracy) in the display to increase.
Loud is up. Musical pitch increases, goes up, left to right. 20Hz and 20,000Hz are the limits of normal human hearing.
20Hz is where earthquakes and thunderstorms live. You’ve probably met 3000. That’s babies screaming on a jet while they push their fingernails down a blackboard.
20,000 and up is where bats chat. Most people can’t hear much over about 15,000 and that number dips as you age. If you’re a young girl, you may be able to hear the bats.
The graphic gets more and more detailed and accurate as you pull the window wider and taller on the screen.
Most people have a more or less even, gentle haystack when they speak. Your presentation has a noticeable tilt upper left to lower right. That’s the boom sound.
You can get the other display, the rainbow thing right on the timeline. Use the dropdown menu to the left of the track > Spectrogram. Write down where you were.
Koz
We keep making a big deal about the headphones because they’re required if you don’t have a killer sound system. Somehow you or someone needs to be able to hear what you’re doing.
Yes, some people announce with headphones and some don’t. It can be handy if you’re announcing for a long while to keep your speaking volume constant.
Telephones before cellphones had “sidetone.” A little of your own voice was fed back into your ear. it was a confirmation that the phone was working and engineers found it helped keep the speaking voice at constant volume. This is what you’re missing when people on cellphones ask you if you can hear them OK. People rarely had to do that on telephones.
You should get as close as possible to perfect while you’re presenting. Production editing already takes five times the length of the show and sometimes it’s quality processing on top of that.
I’m not making up that number. You will be listening through the whole show to make sure you remember where all the goofs are, and then again to make sure the show is ready to go to the client, so there’s two times the show right there and I’m not even breathing hard.
Hollywood runs on Sony MDR-7506 headphones. If you walk onto a set and ask for headphones, someone is going to hand you a pair of 7506s. I know people on their fourth pair. Besides the obvious mechanical and electrical features, their talent is the ability to reveal all the problems. As a sound operator, you want to get there to fix problems before anybody else hears them.
That said, they’re not all that pleasant to listen to in my opinion. I will not be settling down to listen to an Iron Horse concert with them.
My personal favorite is Sennheiser eh-150. Mine are rescue puppies. I found them broken in the back of a production studio. I fixed them really liked them and they’ve been here ever since. I will shortly buy a second set—if possible—and replacement parts for these. Other forum elves have their own favorites, which last time I did this, didn’t write down.
Koz
I found the post.
https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/what-headphones-best-for-editing-regular-or-studio/39795/1
Koz
Thank you very much for the advice on the headphones. I added several blankets to the walls that were bare today, as well as one “blocking off” the rest of the closet. I recorded dead silence, and analyzed it. Still had a very sharp peak at about 11Hz, and I had the headphones unplugged and put away. I think I can hear what you mean by sounding like I’m in a rain barrel now. What are my next steps?
Another thing I noticed (and this may be normal, I don’t know). I read on the forum that when you’re setting up, you should watch the bars in Audacity while you’re just talking into the mic, and adjust the gain until your peaks are just about -6 dB. When I did that, I had to turn the gain nearly all the way up on my Scarlett 2i2. Is that normal?
I had to turn the gain nearly all the way up on my Scarlett 2i2. Is that normal?
Yes.
I have two USB microphone adapters. One runs all the way up and doesn’t get loud enough, and the other runs almost all the way up.
That’s not strictly an electronic or audio consideration. It’s a business problem.
Audio over-volume, overload or “clipping” is immediately obvious, sounds terrible and it’s permanent. It’s one of the ways to permanently kill a show, so most USB microphones and USB microphone preamplifiers are designed with “restrained volume.” A low volume recording may be rescued with post production processing, filtering, effects and other sound file management. Sometimes not. Sometimes, very low volume creates its own problems.
Bottom line: Overload causes you to send the microphone back. Quiet sound doesn’t.
Nobody will come after you with a stick if your peaks fail to hit -6dB. If you go much over that, you could run into the above overload problem. If you go much under that, the natural hiss, buzz and system noises will start to be significant in your show. People have posted with timeline blue waves nearly flat from low volume asking how to “fix it” so they can read AudioBooks. You probably don’t.
If you get too far from normal announcing volume, you’re not normal post production adjustments any more. You’re disaster recovery.
-6dB on the sound meters and 50% (0.5) on the blue waves is the same sound measured differently.
Koz
So given that when I recorded total silence and I still had the spike around 11 Hz, what is my next step?
It may be possible to notch filter that out. If you post a short sample in WAV format we can see if that’s likely to work and suggest settings if it is.
Here’s how to post the audio sample: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/how-to-post-an-audio-sample/29851/1
The easiest thing to do is keep applying LF Rolloff once to each recording.
The interference could be coming from anywhere. Now you’re into exotic USB failures.
“The hard drive is putting a motor whine on the computer five volt system which is rolling down the USB connection into the preamp of the 2i2 and into the show.”
There is no problem that an engineer can’t make worse.
It’s perfectly normal to have computer problems show up in the performance with USB connections, although the 2i2 is usually immune to those problems.
Change the computer. Borrow one just to see if the spike goes away.
I’ve never heard of a 2i2 doing this on its own, but that’s possible, too. The Scarlett 2i2 does not plug into the wall. It’s powered from the computer and it’s a complete slave to whatever the computer and UBS connection is doing.
This is only a problem if you’re reading for AudioBooks with their odd quality-control measuring system. Most applications are just not going to care. You could record podcasts from now until the sun cools off and nobody will know there’s anything wrong. You could probably record for commercial voice-overs and nobody would catch it—although I wouldn’t. The first time somebody does catch it you could get a reputation.
“Oh, yeah. He’s the guy with that rumble problem…”
Koz
Just a note: there’s a second generation 2i2 on the market these days. Looks the same, has a bit better specs and better instrument inputs. The first generation sometimes had analog clipping and distortion with very hot output guitars.
Is yours a first or a second generation?
Mine is a second gen. I’ll just keep going and using the roll off EQ. What about the “rain barrel” problem? Solvable?
What about the “rain barrel” problem? Solvable?
Sure. Additional soundproofing should do it.
Post Production Filtering has some interesting problems here. The rumble filter’s job is to destroy everything below (to the left of) 100Hz. It’s not fuzzy about it. It was specifically designed to do that with gentle or minimal damage to everything else. You can actually hear it working if you compare before and after clips of voice with your high quality headphones or killer sound system. Some people have voice quality down that low and you can’t use it any more. Other means must be found or custom filters used.
Most of the time the effect fades into the background. Most of the movie voices you’ve ever heard have been through a 100 Hz filter (or equivalent) on a live action mixer.
Not so the rain-barrel comb-filter effect. While you can probably help that with custom notches and fancy-pants equalization, the work is all happening in the middle of the voice range. You always get voice tonal damage when you do that.
This is exactly why ACX doesn’t want anybody to use heavy filtering and effects on an audiobook voice.
Koz