VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

annaclaire · Posted: Thu Jan 30, 2014 5:40 pm Post subject:

Mr. Vkuehn, that is one of the top similes I've ever heard. Very effective.

I am sure Audacity can tell me all that I need to know, however I am in the process of learning what to ask of it and then how to ask. For instance, I am expanding my vocabulary by learning words like "plot spectrum" and "noise floor".

-c
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annaclaire · Posted: Fri Jan 31, 2014 12:19 pm Post subject:

I think this is the link to my sample. (Never used Soundcloud before.)

https://soundcloud.com/clairehamiltonvoiceover/clairehamilton-sample-and

Thank you so much for this!
-c
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Bish · Posted: Fri Jan 31, 2014 1:21 pm Post subject:

First things first... You're peaking at around -7db, and your noise floor is around -57dB ... a signal to noise ratio of about 50dB... which in itself isn't bad... however, it sounds much worse than the numbers suggest because there's a high element of noise in the band up to 3KHZ (which is why it sounds like a telephone line when you crank up the room tone section). Actually, the low frequency part is quite well filtered out, but something is generating/lifting that CSB (commercial speech band) noise between 300Hz and 3Khz. Thank you Adobe Audition spectral analysis!

OK... now the others can try and tell you why Smile

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annaclaire · Posted: Fri Jan 31, 2014 2:21 pm Post subject:

I think my laptop needs to come out of the closet.

Thank you so much for this analysis!

I am having a heck of a time finding any Audacity tutorials to tell me how to do any part of what you just did. I have Adobe CS5 suite and it includes Soundbooth. Do you think a.) Soundbooth can show the right meters, etc. and b.) I'll have an easier time finding instruction?

BTW, you rock!
-c
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todd ellis · Posted: Fri Jan 31, 2014 2:30 pm Post subject:

is this an unaltered sample? no EQ or processing of any kind?

i'm not the techiest person here - but i agree with peter that your noise floor is the least of your problems. do you have a bass rolloff flipped somewhere? mic? pre?
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annaclaire · Posted: Fri Jan 31, 2014 3:25 pm Post subject:

--The mic is set on a cardoid pattern, 0db (the other option is -10db), and the roll off switch is set to the straight line (as opposed to the one that goes down at the end).

--The mic goes straight into the Tascam which has the phantom power button engaged and I set the gain in the middle (I usually turn it way u Hobo Happy

.

--The Tascam connects to my macbook pro directly with a firewire cable. I record in Audacity and have that set to 48000 Hz and 16 bit default sample rate.

I think that's everything.

Depending on the audition, sometimes I'll take a sample of a "silence" and use the "noise reduction" effect to make it sound a little better. Usually I amplify it as well, but I didn't do any of that to this sample.

I don't know how to equalize, compress, etc.
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captain54 · Lucky 700 Joined: 30 Jan 2006 Posts: 744 Location: chicago

I normalized @ 0db, and had it peaking @-3db... the noise floor of the room tone was around -53db ... a notch (-10 db) @1.6K with a tight Q knocked the hiss out of the room tone quite a bit, eliminated it somewhat in the VO but funked it up a bit..

An Expander/Gate brought the noise floor to -60db in the room tone...

The culprit is is the 1.6 - 1.7k band.. I suspect thats the laptop..
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annaclaire · Posted: Fri Jan 31, 2014 10:13 pm Post subject:

A family emergency is taking me out of town tomorrow, but I will record again with the laptop out of the room and see if that does the trick.

Thank you again!

-c
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Philip Banks · Posted: Sat Feb 01, 2014 2:24 am Post subject:

Hope the family emergency resolves itself in good time.

I looked at the content supplied by members of Nerds Anonymous and can only write as someone who, not making jokes here, has no idea what normalise means and can sort of guess the meaning of noise floor but don't really know.

Having placed the above on record I listened to the clip and the quality is not where you need to be. Trust your ears, not the numbers.

Larger room, nicely treated so it's dead.
Mic. Neumann U87 would be great, Neumann TLM103 just fine, Sennheiser MKH416 will do just nicely. Everything else is just fluff.

bobbinbeamo · Posted: Wed Feb 05, 2014 6:10 am Post subject:

Go Frank! Good advice here. The only thing I could add is that if you need to increase gain so much, it's probably adding plenty of noise to your audio. And I'll bet it's visible in your wav file. I do like my 2i2 very much.
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vkuehn · Posted: Wed Feb 05, 2014 9:15 am Post subject:

Let me type very carefully. I don't want this thought to be mis-understood.

One of the issues with your recording you made available is 'too much room noise'. Here is the topic I have never seen discussed. We don't all deliver the same sound level of voice to the microphone. Some of us have booming voices, some of us have quieter, less forceful voices. What is the range from the loudest normal delivery to the quietest normal delivery?

Those who speak softly will find room noise coming up and biting their behind before those who speak more loudly. (Well... that's my theory and I am sticking to it!) It would be interesting to talk with techs, producers, the people sitting in the control studio recording a variety of voices who walk in and use the same mic in the same studio. What is the range from loudest to softest spoken? 3 dB? 6 dB? 9 dB?

So why the disclaimer at the beginning? Our original poster is female. Does the female voice tend, on average, to be a bit quieter? Does the female voice tend to not cover up existing noise as well... or does it tend to have frequency ranges that cover up existing noise even better than a male voice?

What difference does it make? When planning, constructing and installing acoustical material, isolation material and equipment, each of us needs to know if our voice covers ambient noise better, or lets it slip through better. Then we know how picky, picky, picky we need to be with studio design and construction.

In doing book narrations where my native Southwestern drawl/twang can be an appropriate ingredient, I find my voice level does not seem to cover up the noise as well as a radio commercial type of delivery.

Every last dB counts!!!

georgethetech · Posted: Wed Feb 05, 2014 9:34 am Post subject:

It's not the noise that matters, it's the Single to Noise Ratio that matters.
The dB range from noise floor to peak of voice levels. The softer the voice, the lower the range will be. The louder the voice, the larger. With louder voices comes the issue of increased energy which needs increased acoustic damping. Pick your poison, or fix both issues if you can, but if acoustics are too live, speak softer, and of noise floor is too high, speak louder.
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