Episode Notes

In this episode Derek Lane and myself discuss some of our introduction to audio and a little about the art of choosing a microphone. If you wish to reach Derek you can email: [email protected]

Transcription:

Kerry: Welcome to this episode of conversations with Kerry. And I'm delighted to invite a friend of mine on to discuss a fascinating topic. And that is, types and varieties of microphones because obviously, if you're going to record stuff, one of the things that you will need to do that is a microphone. And this fellow who I'm going to invite to the podcast, I met in 2011. I think it was Hello, Derek was it 2011? 2012? It was 11. And I was mystified because there wasn't a lot of hiss in his audio background, we were running an academy. I had headsets, and they hit like a snake. And I couldn't figure out why Derek's audio was so clear. And in fact, I think you'll find that it wasn't always this good either. You started off from humble beginnings as well, I think you told me you started off with some very entry level gear when you were young and upgraded as you as you got older.

Derek: Yes, so basically, I had two options. When I recorded in the computer, when I first got an actual machine capable of recording audio without messing up things or freezing, I could either connect the really crappy microphone that came with the computer to the computer and pick up a lot of hiss and ambience from the kitchen because the computer was sort of in the dining room as a central Family Resource. Or I could record my audio on a tape, and then hook a tape deck to the computer and play it off of the tape. So then that gave me a different set of issues. So I could I could pick the poison as it were.

Kerry: So on the one hand, you could have sort of iffy sounding audio from the computer's microphone with background, kitchen, ambience and whatever else. Or you could have tape hiss and the artifacts from the actual tape recorder?

Derek: Pretty much. Yeah, I'm sure in my room, I had a mixer. And it was a Sony 3 Head Cassette deck. And so I could make good quality recordings for what it was and the time. But you still had the nice, wonderful, idiosyncratic characteristics of tape plus poor mp3 encoding because this was the late 90s, early 2000s. And I was on dial up so naturally, the sacrifices in the compromises were pretty nasty.

Kerry: Yeah, if you're on dial up, and I remember these days quite well, because we were on dial up and stuff as well. Your general encode bit rate was 128 kilobits per second or lower. It was a meg a minute for music. And it took a long time to download that. I mean, you're looking at four and a half to five minutes at 56k. So you were looking at a mag every 20 minutes at 14, four, or a mag every 10 minutes at 28 Eight. So it took a long time to download things

Derek: To break it down. If the song was five minutes long, it might take you 15 or so. Especially if someone was sending it to you over email, you know, and they had to upload it themselves. It was a if you wanted the song. In other words, you really, really wanted that song. Yes, that recording from your friend.

Kerry: And in fact, I think I would argue that because media was more hard won back in the late 90s, early noughties. We valued the files in a way more because they were harder to get and harder to obtain. And it was like wow, I have whatever it is that I've managed to download. Now, one of the things you said to us as part of the recording course. Now, Derek taught recording courses for us for a number of years for the Cisco Academy for the visually impaired, overworked, underpaid, but did manage to have quite a lot of fun doing it and got him into the Jive of teaching. That you said An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So did these early years teach you that the cleaner and better your input sources and things were the ultimately better? Your final results could be?

Derek: Yes, because audio cleanup software has advanced significantly over the last few years. But back then it technically worked but left its own mess in the wake of the audio that was preserved and quote unquote, restored. I mean, you had things like verbose audio wizard and dark pro 98 and ruber mechanic and that was about it. And the accessibility varied, the quality varied, it's just, it was. So if you could at the source, get your audio cleaner, not only would it sound better, even though you did have some rudimentary processing back in the day, but the computer itself would take, you know, anywhere, at least the one I had anywhere from, you know, 20 to 30 minutes to clean up a file, you know, a 10th, the length, it would take a long time to do. So that was another step.

Kerry: And so you would essentially set your parameters and wait for the results of the job. So you'd literally go exist somewhere else, have a drink, eat lunch, come back, and then check what the results of the processing work.

Derek: And if they weren't good, ye did it again.

Kerry: Yepp, and it was rinse and repeat. And there was a lot of patience. And you learned to be intuitive with your settings as much as possible, even though that wasn't always possible. And you learned that because the batches took so long to run, you wouldn't actually run the job unless you were sure, or at least reasonably sure that the parameters were accurate. I remember when we made our first mp3 CD back in 1996. And we all got together a number of us and questionable legality, but it was many years ago. And we encoded 650 Meg's of mp3 all at 128 kilobits, we cringed about it later. But that's how the audio world is you do the best with what you have at the time. It used to take 15 to 20 minutes to encode an mp3, especially if you're using something like what was it called Fraunhofer? Fraunhofer was very slow. I'm sure you've used that back in the day.

Derek: That sadly, it was the best you could get. It was the sound for bit rate, the quality, you know.

Kerry: Quality was phenomenal and then you had things like zing that were much faster and cringe worthy in a lot of ways

Derek: And then the ever horrible blading. That thing was nasty.

Kerry: It was it was but a lot of us resorted to it because it was faster than L three NK L three dec, even though we shouldn't have. And we've sort of put up with the results that came out of that. But it's fair to say that even though we're almost 30 years on 2021, and the world has changed a lot. I would argue that the analog components in a studio slash recording setup are still very important

Derek: Yes, especially these days, with everyone working from home, we have had a sort of slump in the quality that is acceptable in the mainstream. But there is the situation where if you have a higher quality sound coming into someone's podcast, that could potentially lead you to other opportunities. Hey, you sound really good. What are you doing? Would you like to edit my podcast? I'll pay you 50 bucks an episode or 100 bucks an episode or whatever, just by virtue of showing up and sounding good? Yes, or I have this family gathering that I will really, really want to record because time is precious, and people age and these recordings are my picture equivalents. And I'd love to, you know, capture them and the ambience of the gathering the ebst I can. So there are all kinds of reasons to invest in audio gear. Now, once you get past a certain point, there's also a law of diminishing returns that kicks in.

Kerry: And I know we've talked about this, but would you agree that in the last sort of 10 to 15 years, I mean, you still have to put reasonable money into your audio gear. But the lower end has improved quite a lot. So what you can get for one to $200 is a lot better than what you could get for one to $200 So 10 years ago.

Derek: I would absolutely agree with that. Especially considering that there's also a lot more awareness of measures you can take to make the most out of that equipment, be it a $20 microphone, or a $200 microphone or a $1,200 microphone. There's still certain things that just make the sound better

Kerry: Oh yeah, absolutely absent

Derek: For example, if you have fan noise from your computer And the mic is picking that up no matter what you do. Can you move the computer away from the microphone? Yeah. If when you're typing, and you know, that's actually generating a lot of thump through the microphone, it may not look the coolest. But take a few towels, fold them kind of in a square, and then put the mic stand on those towels, and that will dampen and decouple the sound of you typing and, you know, hitting the desk or whatever from the microphone.

Kerry: I remember, in the mid naughties, you had a lot of people who had computer setups, and they had external hard drives, and all of the external hard drives hung out on the desk. And they would put their digital recorder on the desk connected up to the computer, and your recording would be full of (Kerry makes fuzzy noises) from the 7200 RPM hard drives. And you would find that if they lifted that recorder up, put something soft under it some sponge or towels or clothing or something soft, you could actually greatly minimize that noise and greatly minimize that interference.

Derek: And of course, that is naturally getting back to the An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure or cleanup or what have you. Because yes, are there tools that can reverse some, you know, some of that and take some of that sound out? Oh, yes, in fact, they can do a remarkable job. But again, it's learning how to use them, assuming you even want to, it's taking the time to use them, once you have taken the time to learn how.

Kerry: Yes And it's also knowing how to use that getting the knowledge to be able to set the parameters in such a way that when you run audio through these tools, it doesn't do irrevocable damage to the audio or leave artifacts behind. And I don't know whether you've noticed. And partially it's the I think it's the pandemic that's a result of this, but you actually get some quite horrible audio quality coming in on radio interviews these days, you know, because people are out and about on location, and they using their phones and whatever else. And that's what they've got. And that's what we tend to get as the as the audio coming in.

Derek: And that has inspired companies such as isotope to create a function in their advanced RX product to look at what few highs exist in a recording, and then guess what the absent highs would be and actually synthesize them. And like anything else, any process results may vary. Have I gotten incredible sounding results with this process? Yes, I have. I've you know, taken you know, someone on a bad zoom call with that kind of echo canceled iPhone nastiness. And you know, you don't hear any highs. It sounds like they're talking from far away even though they're not. And, you know, it's taken that engine just made that sound a lot smoother. Depending on the voice though, there are some voices where that just doesn't work. You no matter what you do can still distinguish between the synthesized RX sound and the recording. And that's just the way it is

Kerry: Yeah. No, that's fair enough. That's fair enough. Now as you advance through your audio career, did you find that as you had the means and ability to improve your microphones? Did you find that the source material your recording was actually getting better and better as you did that?

Derek: It was getting different. It was getting different because yes, I had a computer in my wrist before I moved out of my parents place. I had a computer in the bedroom so I didn't have to connect it via either running a cable all the way up the hall from my room to the dining room area, or put audio on a tape or use the crappy microphone from the computer. I could record directly in but of course I heard the hype about you need to get a condenser microphone. You really want to have that awesome sound that really cool studio sound. You need a condenser mic that's just what you gotta have. Well, yes, I fell into that hype. And for 80 bucks, I bought a condenser mic. Oh, yeah. And this thing was amazing, because it did have that really nice bassy presence. It did have that shimmer on the high end. And it also picked up every freaking thing in the room. Everything Yes, your computer fan. If I moved in my chair, if, you know a flea farted everything, it didn't you know, the mic wasn't supposed to do that it was advertised as a cardioid microphone, which means that it picks up in one direction. But that one direction was a circle. Practically. It was just not a good. So that's why I say it was different. So that I could use processing to minimize the computer fan, because it was a loud computer fan until I had the money to get a better power supply. I had all kinds of nasty computer noise that I had to take out. Yes. But by about 2008 or nine, I had solved all those problems. And so I was ready to present myself in the way you heard me in 2011, when I had also upgraded the microphone, again to something that was much better. But still a condenser microphone with the pickup problem of getting a fair bit of the room if I wasn't careful. Plus, I had moved and had a dedicated studio room. But that may not be you, you may not have all this dedicated stuff. And so naturally, you want to make the most of what you do have. Yes. And so, you know, that's my story, some of it being relevant

Kerry: If I remember correctly, in 2011, you were on the CAD M 176, or 177

Derek: 177. So that was my upgrade. And it's still a good mic. I still like it. It sounds very different from this microphone. Yet it still has its place. Would you like to hear it?

Kerry: At some point, yes. Yes, I want to what I do want to point out to the listeners at the moment, though, is that Derek is talking to us on the SM seven. And and so make sure it's a shore mark? Sure it is. But it's it's quite an expensive mic from shore and a very nice mark from shore. It's a dynamic. So he has a lot of top end. And he sounds quite reasonable at least you sound as though you've got a lot of top end on this end when I listened to your signal. So it's almost the best of both worlds in a way from dynamic and condenser, you've got the rejection of the dynamic, but you still have a good frequency profile.

Derek: And for those who don't know what a dynamic microphone is picture a speaker in reverse. So if you, for example, plugged a set of headphones into a microphone input, they would be the really horrible sounding set of microphones. Yep. And if you plug a microphone into a headphone jack, and it's a dynamic microphone, you will very quietly hear the audio that's being produced by the device to which you connect to the microphone. I have not used this microphone as a speaker though. But I have used cheaper mics as speakers in my childhood when messing around to see what happens if I, et cetera.

Kerry: When I was actually when I was actually younger, my mother had a stereo system. And it came with two dynamic microphones that you could plug into the front of it, one for the left channel and one for the right channel. And they had 3.5 mil audio jacks and you'd plug them into the stereo and you could record with them and nobody ever recorded with them because nobody did that when I was that young. But you could plug these things into the stereo and turn the speakers up and make yourself sound very loud provided you didn't feed back. But then I discovered that if you actually plugged one of these little microphones into the headphone jack, the radio would come out of the little microphone, which I thought was kind of cool. Yep. Yeah. So dynamic microphone, they do not require phantom power, or plug in power. They are a coil moving in a magnetic field, often with a diaphragm attached to them. So that the the I don't know. I haven't actually pulled apart of an expensive dynamic microphone but I did break a whole lot of cheap ones and essentially what they had was a coil attached to a piece of cellophane. These are the really cheap ones. And that cellophane would vibrate the coil in the magnetic field which would induce a voltage That would give you your signal.

Derek: And a little tiny very very small signal. Very low

Kerry: Very low, yes.

Derek: And so of course you had to have electronics. And so one of the things of course you needed was a good microphone preamp. And what is a microphone preamp? Pray tell microphone preamp is something that we all have a lot of in our lives of various qualities and totally take for granted. They are the devices they may be an entire piece of hardware, they may be a little integrated chip on something that take the very, very quiet signal from the microphone, and then boost it up to a much louder signal that other audio equipment likes to deal with

Kerry: Yep and depending on the quality of that preamp, and the build of that preamp, and how well that preamp is is shielded and installed, will negatively or positively impact your signal.

Derek: In fact, because this dynamic microphone is so low, even though I'm running a very good microphone preamp in the mixer that I have, if I turn it up loud enough, you will hear some hiss now I have to turn it up so loud that I better not do anything else but exist, but it's still there in the background, so but I had to turn that…-

Kerry: Way, way, way up.

Derek: Yes. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah

Kerry: And one of the things I will say about Behringer preamps, generally speaking, Behringer, mic preamps. And I think this is pretty true across a lot of their range. They have a lot of dynamic range in the preamps. Now, whether you want to use all of that dynamic range is questionable, you often do not want the trims on Behringer preamps at full unless you're doing very specific things in very specific circumstances.

Derek: Yes, even this microphone is one for example that you wouldn't want to turn all the way up. By the way the trim in case we want to sort of initiate you into the whole audio geekery stage is just basically the volume, the amount of volume that the preamp provides. So with the trim all the way down, the signal basically passes through unchanged, you start turning up the trim, you start making that preamp do more and more and more work revealing noise at some point. Now with a condenser microphone, because as Kerry mentioned they have phantom power given to them by your mic preamp. They have their own circuitry that is capable of generating noise. And so you may have a great preamp and a noisy microphone that completely nullifies the quality of the preamp. Or you may have an incredibly awesome microphone with incredibly awesome specs that will provide a great signal with very little if any noise in it. But if the preamp isn't good, then you're going to get noise from it. And the crazy part about it is is when you're dealing with extremely high end microphones, some of them have even with condenser mics, a low output. And so you may find with an expensive fancy microphone, you're getting more noise in your setup than a cheaper mic that may not have as good spec on it in terms of its background noise, but that has a hotter output. So if you read about all these people who have these incredibly expensive mics, they may not serve you as well as you might think.

Kerry: And if so if you don't have the supporting equipment to run an expensive microphone or really top end microphone, like a Neumann or one of the higher end, I need to mortgage my house to afford this thing. You may be better going towards the more mid range or lower than the top end because your underlying gear can't afford to run that sort of gear efficiently. I'm going to turn it off for a second here and point out that if you have enjoyed any of the audio geekery in this podcast and these topics do interest you then you should certainly look into IC music because they teach a lot of this stuff and they teach a lot of these courses. And they also teach how to use digital audio workstations and a whole lot of other things. And if you have lots of money and you'd like to spend it you can also find Derek and he might teach you

Derek: I have full I know I do work with people, I try to understand where they're from, where their is and where they're coming from. Because, you know, quite frankly, I want to help people help themselves. Yes. But I want to do it in such a way where everybody wins.

Kerry: Absolutely, absolutely. And sometimes you can help somebody. And you can do it at quite a reasonable price point for that person, because you understand where they are and what they're doing. And the dream, slash project that they're doing is something that you enjoy and you feel is worthwhile doing. So you will provide that help. Whereas you want the people that you help you want them to be invested in the production of their material and passionate about their craft, I would say is a fair statement.

Derek: Yes, I would absolutely agree with that. And, you know, the fact is, if you're not passionate about it, you don't have that dream, then you're going to eventually decide that it's not worth it. The financial factor may play into this, the time it takes to become proficient may play into it. But ultimately, you're going to decide that it's worth it or it's not.

Kerry: Yep. And I think that's something that's worth mentioning. You want people who are passionate about it, and you want people who are invested in the projects and things that they're doing. Because that way, I know for myself personally, that way people are making effective use of my time and my knowledge and my resources. Because there have been times when I have bailed Derek out of semesters in other technical spheres.

Derek: Yes he has.

Kerry: We make sure that when he gives me a call that there is a problem there that I'm solving and that I'm working towards fixing and Norbert will thank me and so will your DNS settings and a few other things.

Derek: Norbert Lully, my NASS, which is basically a fancy file server. Fancy file server? Yes. Yes. It is. that's a brief way to describe boxwalla.

Kerry: And yes, referring back to one of my previous podcasts, yes, he does have backups, which is very important. Now, are we getting into playing with things today? Or will that be enough for now? And we'll come back into the mics and other day, I'm happy either way?

Derek: Well, I think what we should do is call it an episode for now, because we have definitely in and inundated people with details. All right. And what we plan on doing for the next episode of conversations with Kerry is demonstrating several microphones, and how they can be most effectively used. And we're going to go anywhere from we're going to start with a $20 microphone. And we are going to work up to a $1,200 microphone.

Kerry: And I think that's going to be fascinating for our listeners. And I think also the thing that I would point out about all of this stuff, and we are going to show you some very interesting things. And I might even pull out some cheap microphones that I got off eBay, because I think that would be worthwhile. Absolutely. I think the thing that I want to point out before I hit the stop button here is something that's really important when you are choosing a microphone, and we will get into this next time we record when you choose a microphone. Ultimately, you are the one that has to be happy with that microphone. When you put your hard earned dollars, coins, cryptocurrency, whatever you're gonna spend on actually doing this. And you listen to this microphone and you test and you do all the things with it. You have to be happy with what you purchased. And without starting a holy war. Everybody has their opinions on microphones. We know that Derek and I have a mutual friend who doesn't like the SM seven that much. And that's okay. They're entitled to their opinion. And they're absolutely entitled to that and they are entitled to use whatever they would like to use on their setup, as Derek is absolutely allowed to use whatever he wants on his setup so that he can decide what sounds good and what he enjoys.

Derek: let me speaking of of enjoying mics and using various microphones and enjoying some of them and not enjoying others. This is officially to debunk the idea that a condenser microphone is the right kind of microphone for you. And you definitely need a condenser mic no matter what you do. I would imagine that even over the slightly bandwidth limited chat that we're hearing live, you're getting a much better recording on the podcast. You can tell this microphone does not flatter my voice. But it's condenser microphone, so it's awesome. Oh yeah, it's good. All right, yeah. And it runs it like, you know, I turned the mic preamp almost all the way down because it's a lot hotter of an output than the SM seven. So that makes it even better, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's actually turned it up a little bit. already. And that was still turning the mic preamp up of about half of the amount that I turned that mic preamp up for the demonstration of the SM seven. But this microphone has its own self noise. But it's a condenser mic. So it's awesome. Everybody run out and get a condenser microphone right now, because they're awesome

Kerry: Well fascinating point, actually. And this is a bit of a tangent, but I mentioned it because this was an experience I had in 1999 - 2000.  Many disc because I had the Sony M Zed 90 Mini disc recorder. And I remember that that was the first time that I actually had trouble distinguishing my recordings from the actual real world. If that makes sense. I actually could get confused as to what was in my headphones and what was going on around me with the MiniDisc. And even then I had microphones with self noise that ran off a double A battery and that sort of stuff. But they were still good enough to, to make me wonder whether somebody was actually saying something to me in person, or whether it was being said to me in the headphones. So, but yes, condenser microphones are not always better. Now. And not, not every condenser microphone is awesome. And not every dynamic microphone is awesome. And in the next episode, you're going to hear things from awful to awesome.

Derek: And make find the more some of the more expensive things you hear to be awesome. But not awesome enough to invest all that money in.

Kerry: No. And probably the final point I'll make is depending on your voice and what you're recording, or depending on the voices that you are recording and what you are recording, different microphones suit different people. So for example, I don't do too badly on the road and T one, although I have to make sure I don't edit that out. I get lots of math noise. So there are downsides. It's not perfect for everyone. But other people don't do as well on this microphone and other people don't do as well on other microphones, which is why when I went to an audio store, they actually do an interesting thing, which I found fascinating. They blindfold you, if you're going to do voice work, and they record you on a series of different microphones. And they put all of the recordings onto the thumb drive and give it to you. And you take it home and listen to it. And then you double blind, listen to the recordings and pick which one you like. And then when you identify the recording, they will then match it back with the microphone that it came from.

Derek: So that gets rid of our bias. I love it. Yeah, I love that. I absolutely love that

Kerry: And they said I was actually speaking to the guy and he said some people, they don't pick the Neumann e 47, or whatever it is. They don't pick the $3,000 microphone. They've picked something that's mid range that suits them better. Yep. Yep. Yep. So part two, we will show you some microphones. We'll show you some cool things. Do you still have the CMC cm 177 That makes the weird noises when you turn it off?

Derek: Yes, I do. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Kerry: Well, good. We will play with that one.

Derek: Yeah, that's fun.

Kerry: That is fun. We'll definitely show you that. But thank you for checking in for Episode One. I appreciate your involvement in the podcast, Derek, and thank you for contributing your wisdom and knowledge as always, and I and I'm sure my listeners once I get this edited up are very much looking forward to part two, where we are going to listen to a number of different microphones possibly on definitely on Derek side and possibly on my side as I have different microphones here that I can also use. So thank you. Take care

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