Adobe Audition is suddenly capturing a lot of noise while recording

Question

Hello Community Members,I have been recording audio in Adobe Audition for a few months now. I last recorded audio in this setup a few days back ( May 13), and the noise level was really low. You can hear the recording in clean.wav.However, today (May 16) when I tried recording the audio for another tutorial (noisy.wav), the noise seems to be too high. These are raw audio files, no effects. It is the same windows PC, same microphone, same low-noise room. The mic is a condenser mic with a USB connection. The Audition version is 13.0.5 for both recordings. The only few noticeable things that have happened in between these 3 days is that I had unplugged the USB from mic after the last recording, I replugged today. Also, I see 2 Microsoft windows updates in my system in this period. I am not a person who understands much about the Audition tool, so I am not sure where to investigate further. Anyone who knows what is going wrong or where should I look next?

SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Accepted Answer

No, not the mic itself - but Windows updates can certainly mess with anything Microsoft want to. I wouldn't worry though - the way it's presently set is actually correct. It may sound noisier, but at least that is an accurate, unmessed about with recording; all you have to do is treat the background sound using Audition's NR. I didn't have any trouble getting the noise down to the computer fan level, and with a bit more work that could have gone too. And it left a much cleaner recording than the first one.

SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Answer

Hmm... this is not quite as simple as you might think! For a start, the recording levels are different - but that doesn't matter, as we can normalize them to the same level (-1dB) and then we've got a reasonable comparison of the relative noise levels. But then, if I listen to the 'clean' file, I discover that compared to the noisy one, the noise floor is indeed about 5-6dB lower - but also that's about the amount that the bottom end of the file has been expanded out with some sort of gate. You can hear this clearly if you listen to the ends of words on that file compared to the noisy one.

Now, if you swear blind you didn't touch either of these recordings, I need to know a bit more about this mic, and any control panel that it has - because it will mean that the mic sound has been got at on the way in - if you see what I mean...

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