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manuelv63662182
manuelv63662182
Participant
August 4, 2017
Question

Odd microphone hiss during Podcast

  • August 4, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 768 views

Hi All,

I've scoured the forums and discussions to see if anybody is having the same issue as me but I can't seem to find any. I'll try to explain it and see if anyone can help.

I recently got some new equipment to setup a podcast at my work. I'm no audio engineer but I was able to set it up and successfully record our first podcast. I have 4 Audio Technica BPHS1 Studio headsets that I use as mics. I feed those into a Tascam US-4x4 Audio interface that then feeds via USB into Audition to record.

I was able to record 4 guests speaking just fine, no problems there. Audio sounded great. My problem is playback. When I playback the audio I get a strange hiss that only comes up whenever someone talks- its not a background hiss (like an AC unit) or constant hum- it's almost like it's attached to the vocals themselves. When I was recording it was crystal clear, but on playback and on the mixdown .wav file, the hiss is there.

So at first I thought I had a bad mic and I started soloing some tracks to identify which mic was making the noise. Here's the thing- when I solo a track the hiss is gone. Each mic independently sounds amazing but when they are played at the same time, I get that weird hiss that comes in and out as they speak.

Is this a hardware issue? A playback issue? A mic setup issue? Like I said the audio sounded perfect during recording.

Settings for Audition record if interested: Device class is set to ASIO and sample rate is at 4800 Hz

I feel like there is something that I am overlooking but I just don't know what.

Any help would be appreciated!

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Bob Howes
Bob Howes
Inspiring
August 4, 2017

How far up do you have to turn the input gain on the Audio Interface?  I notice that the headset mics you use have dynamic capsules which often require the mic pre amp to be turned up pretty high for normal levels.  Having 4 identical mics all turned up could add a cumulative amount of hiss.

The other thing I wonder about is whether the headset has some form of noise gate--the blurb says it's designed to be a communications headset and, while I can't fine mention of noise gating in the spec, this is not unusual on comms headsets.  If so, the mics would be completely quiet until the mic picks up some noise.

SteveG_AudioMasters_
Community Expert
SteveG_AudioMasters_Community Expert
Community Expert
August 4, 2017

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Bob+Howes  wrote

The other thing I wonder about is whether the headset has some form of noise gate--the blurb says it's designed to be a communications headset and, while I can't fine mention of noise gating in the spec, this is not unusual on comms headsets.  If so, the mics would be completely quiet until the mic picks up some noise.

But each channel sounds fine on its own, and the spec doesn't mention anything about a built-in squelch control...

Any chance that you can provide a link to a small section of the combined result, illustrating the problem? Preferably in the form of an uncompressed wav file. Putting the file in Dropbox, and getting the public link to it and posting that would be fine.

ryclark
ryclark
Participating Frequently
August 4, 2017

Hi Steve,

Here is a link to an audio sample. It's about a min long. Obviously listening with headphones is the best way to hear what I'm talking about. The hiss is on the whole clip but it's really obvious at :57- when the speaker's sentence ends, this hiss clearly drops out, then comes back as he speaks again.

Dropbox - Podcast audio clip.wav

Let me know if that works.


There is no hiss that I can see or hear anywhere in the audio clip that you have provided even when playing back with the clip amplified and played back at very high volume. It is a very clean recording. So it is a bit of a mystery as the noise doesn't appear to be actually recorded into the audio file. It must be something in your monitoring chain. How are you listening to the output of Audition? What audio interface are your headphones plugged into?

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