Help getting great sounding audio

[maryk62761295]

Hi All,

I recorded both of these clips in audition. One at a radio station with professional equipment, the other in a recording studioat my school.

Radio station studio:

radioTest.wav - Google Drive

School studio:

hamiltonTest.wav - Google Drive

The school lab audio was recorded with a USB rode podcaster mic.  I don't remember the mic I recorded the radio station audio on. Anyway, I think the school lab audio sounds flat and terrible. What can be tweaked about the inputs that will allow me to immediately record better audio? What can be done in post-production to make the second clip sound more like the first?

[SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Accepted solution]

There are so many variables here that it would take a while to work through them all. If you want a simple solution that will fix quite a bit of this, then you need to EQ the podcaster - or preferably set it up in a more acoustically sympathetic environment, although that probably won't be so easy (although a slightly deader space would help...). I got the two samples to sound a lot more like each other just by using some EQ on the school one - here's a screen-grab of the settings I used:

But - and it's important - you'll never get a Rode Podcaster to sound anything really like the mics they'd typically use in a radio station, despite all their claims about it being a broadcast mic, etc. Compared to a proper broadcast mic they have very little 'warmth', and that shows clearly in the recording. And you can't do the other thing that a radio station would normally do - use a broadcast mic processor on it. These are optimised for close-mic use and use all sorts of tricks to get a 'smooth' output - including limiting and compression. As the Rode is a USB mic that connects directly to your computer, this option is not available to you. The best you could hope for is to find a combination of post-recording treatment that works for you, and store it as a preset in the Effects Rack. Typically you'd want to limit the peaks, possibly add a little compression and then the EQ. The order of doing that is important; if you EQ first, then the compression will promptly mess it up. In Audition you could also play around with the Mastering section, or even the vocal enhancer, but I couldn't get either of those to produce as good a result as just applying some EQ.

If you want to know how I arrived at those settings above, it was simple; I placed both tracks in Waveform view and just A-B'd them, adjusting the EQ until the school one sounded much more like the radio one. There's no magic - just a laptop, and a pair of Beyer headphones.

[chrisw44157881]

yes, EQ it first. that will get you 90% there. you can subtly warm stuff with studio reverb size 1; decay 200ms;width 19.9;high freq 161hz, low cut 20hz, damp 50%; diff 50%; dry 100%, wet 78.6% to get warm microphone sound. then maybe multiband compression to enhance some lows.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

chrisw44157881  wrote

then maybe multiband compression to enhance some lows.

No, as I explained above, you have to do that first, otherwise it will screw up the EQ you did. That's why mixers have the insert point before the EQ - that's where you insert the compressor.

Incidentally the 'warmth' I'm talking about has nothing to do with reverb - it's what comes directly from the construction of the mic, and largely comprises 2nd harmonic distortion. Reverb doesn't alter this, as it leaves the direct signal alone. A carefully applied harmonic exciter applied just to the mid-band is more likely to be an acceptable solution, but nowhere near as good as getting hold of an Electrovoice RE-20!