latest of several troublesome delays.
This recording at home thing is harder than it seems. If you believe the ads, just buy their microphone, set up on the kitchen table and start cranking out the high quality work.
We wrote ACX-Check as a convenient guess on how ACX’s Robot automatically inspects new work. You can cycle through two-week submissions to ACX and have it fail, or quickly run ACX Check at home and make corrections right away…if possible.
I know where BWI/BAL is. I lived in College Park. Can you hear planes going over? That’s going to be a challenge. We have had posters in mild shock with a list of appliances that had to be turned off to meet the background noise specification. That’s the killer measurement. We publish an ACX Mastering Suite of tools that automatically set Peak and RMS (Loudness). Noise is the killer and as a rule, you can’t solve it in post production with software.
I have a tiny, very quiet third bedroom that has no echoes and I can meet the noise specification without too much trouble. I put Mr. Wall Clock somewhere else for the duration and unplug the music bass cabinet and internet interface, both of which make acoustical noise. Even with all that, it’s best to work at night when street traffic is almost zero.
I’m in the pattern for LAX, but the jets are multiple thousand feet up when they go over. I can hear them if I’m outside staring up when they go over. With field glasses, I can just make out which airline.
have to crane forward a little bit
That’s where the boom microphone stand comes in.
That’s an on-Stage-Stands microphone stand, OnStageStands9701B. It’s light-weight and folds up to store in a corner of the closet.
It allows you to place the microphone about the level of your nose or slightly higher, either directly in front or slightly to one side and frees up space underneath for your script.
That spidery thing on the back of the microphone is the shock mount to keep floor and desk vibration noises away. Those are rubber bands.
The little folding Snowball stand has problems: You naturally want put it on the table in front, right in the line of your breath blasts, it’s usually in your eye-line where you want to read your script, and it’s right there on the table where it can pick up slap and comb filter effects from the flat surface, and vibrations from the neighbors downstairs.
It’s pretty.
I can identify all the problems except that one tone at 118Hz. 120Hz is the natural tone of electronics, lighting, some motors, etc., in the US. I checked it multiple times. It’s not 120Hz, so I don’t know what it is. Typically, odd tones like that come from computer fans. They have no natural speed and can whine or rumble at odd pitches.
There is a sleuthing thing you can do. Make sure the Snowball is set for Position 1, Cardioid and move it around the room and aim at different places to see if the noise level goes up. That’s how I found my bass cabinet made sound even when it wasn’t being played. You should be speaking into the BLUE logo. That’s the “front” of the microphone.
Koz
