Re: Audio Woes

[Mark Welch] "Here is the setup:
Heil PR 40 mic going thru either a Symetrix 528e voice processor or a Golden Gate Pre 73 pre amp.

Signal then goes out to an Allen & Heath 24 channel mixer then via USB to my computer. I'm running Soundtrack Pro recording software on a 24" iMac."

SNIP


Mark,

With due respect, this is a very "old style"audio chain in modern terms.

While the equipment is all fully professional and proven, audio has come a long, long way since the days that this much gear was necessary to get a high quality audio signal recorded of something as simple as a human voice.

I do dozens of professional Voiceovers a year and have done thousands over the past 30 years. - and for many of those years I used signal chains like you describe above.

It's all gone.

Now my entire studio chain is a Neumann TLM-103 into a Zoom H4N. That's it. Period. The card gets read into my laptop - and if I feel it needs some signal enhancement like compression, it's applied in post with a click. I get BETTER results with this than I did with thousands of dollars in hardware in the past.

That replaced a simple USB pre from Centronics (MicPortPro), that did the Mic to USB conversion in real time with monitoring for under $200 bucks. And the only reason I switched is that I use the Zoom for other field recording and it was easier to just use the same system for everything.

The point is that there's no longer a need for complexity or expense to get quality audio signals digitized and manipulated.

Digital is simple, vastly less expensive, and a whole lot easier than Analog for the kinds of things you need to do.

There are scads of A/D mic to USB/Firewire zero latency solutions with EQ and compression out there today for a few hundred bucks. That's ALL you need. Not boards and boxes, and dozens of cables and ground loop eliminators and all that complexity.

You're making it much, much harder than it needs to be, in my opinion.

FWIW.

"Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions."-Justice O'Connor