The upper limit 8000Hz is not quite high enough for XellReloaded 's voice, (or generally IMO).
I’d have the default upper-limit on Paul-L’s de-esser set at 10kHz,
( & even that may not be high enough for some female voices).
Does anyone know of a better Microphone that’s not going to pick up those whistles as harshly?
I’m sure reverb is a big contributing factor and so I’m going to be getting some acoustic treatment. However I know that wont solve the problem completely. I appreciate you two helping me with de-esser settings and they do help, but with longer recordings the problem persists despite all the settings. I also don’t mind paying for expensive plugins if they will actually solve the problem.
The only thing that works reasonably well is manually editing each S and lowering the volume right down. But that’s impractical for a 20 minute voice recording.
How about a 2 pass solution.
The whistle in your sibilance is between 6700Hz - 9300Hz …
Use Paul-L’s high-resolution ~10 band de-esser on that range, (see above),
then a second pass with a bog-standard one-band de-esser over a wider range, say 4kHz-10kHz.
(e.g. Could Use Paul-L again but with 1/2/3 bands and a 4kHz-10kHz range,
NB: Paul-L settings can be saved as presets).
The mic is probably somewhere between the A and B position but definitely not right in front of my mouth.
Got it. I thought you were talking about the middle position on the rear switches. Oblique positioning is looked on scornfully by a lot of audio people, but not having the microphone directly in front solves a lot of problems, not least of which it allows you to read your script.
I’m not sure where to go with this. The microphone, as published, doesn’t naturally have a rising characteristic. The spec sheet has it more or less flat out to about 15,000 and then it drops.
That’s FM radio specifications. No surprise as that’s one of the target audiences for the microphone. Having audio performance past 15,000Hz is a complete waste of time because the sound has to be filtered heavily to make room for the broadcast stereo pilot tone at 19,000Hz. Many of the highly respected vocal microphones don’t go much over 15,000Hz, either. They’re just built that way.
So assuming the microphone is in good shape, I don’t think changing it is going to gain anything. I would be whipping out my test equipment to find out which stage is causing the problems, but I can’t do that through the forum. None of my sound equipment does that except one AKG which is billed as a “Vocal Microphone,” and has a sharp, forward sound (that don’t entirely like).
So when people show up on the forum with voices that will cut wood, I’m at a loss to explain why.
So fancy-pants software filtering may be your only choice.