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Participant
January 24, 2024
Question

Problems from soundboard to PC

  • January 24, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 164 views

This may be a shot in the dark but I honestly don't know where to turn in order to even understand the problem we're having. I'll do my best to interpret what's going on but just know I won't have all the answers.

 

I stream a church service every Sunday. Our music director paired with our freelance sound guy were experimenting with the different effects for the music for that Sunday service. Nothing sounded out of the ordinary besides the delay they added to the vocals of the music director's mic. It was subtle but could be easily missed if you weren't paying attention. After everything was said and done I kept getting weird responces from others saying there was a weird echo to the music. I thought they were just talking about the delay that was intentionally added but I needed to check the pastors mic levels anyway and when I played the video there's a very noticeable echo when the music director is playing. It sounds like I'm getting two sound sources on the same level but one has a slight delay.

 

We want to try and fix it before abandoning the effect all together but like I said before, I have no idea what's going on or even begin to understand what's happening. We have sound equipment that allows us to hook up several guitars, drums, piano and mics and all of that runs to an audio capture box that then runs through USB to the PC.

 

How can a small delay turn into a huge echo/delay after recording? I have tried fixing the audio in Audition to get rid of the reverb but everything I try makes the audio worse and makes all the talking dialogue to sound lower and softer in the end. Any help would be greatly appreciative.

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1 reply

SteveG_AudioMasters_
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 24, 2024

The first thing you should do is to get rid of all the effects (which I'd argue shouldn't be there on any speech mics anyway, simply for the sake of clarity) and see what, if anything, remains of the problem. The chances are that this will be caused by virtue of the non-delayed sound from the live band being picked up by the pastor's mic - or some combination of things like this - and that's what is being added. Also. in Audition make sure that the live monitoring on any input is turned off whilst you are recording, as that can cause problems with delays as well - although it rather depends on how you are set up, so this may have nothing to do with it.

 

Rule 1 for doing jobs like this is to do it like the broadcasters do. And that is to shut off all mics except the one(s) being used at any given time. Yes, this means actively riding the faders during the production, but it always results in a cleaner output, and it's much easier to spot where the problems are.