Podcast appearances and mentions of Andrew Peters

This week on The Pro Audio Suite, we're joined by Matthew Kleiman from Kit Plugins and the newly developed NoiseHub. We dive into the current plugin landscape, what makes Kit Plugins stand out, and how NoiseHub is aiming to change the way audio professionals collaborate and manage assets. Join George ‘The Tech' Whittam, Robert Marshall, Darren ‘Robbo' Robertson, and Andrew Peters as they explore the tools and trends shaping the audio post-production industry today. A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth... https://tribooth.com/ And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear..  https://austrian.audio/ We have launched a Patreon page in the hopes of being able to pay someone to help us get the show to more people and in turn help them with the same info we're sharing with you. If you aren't familiar with Patreon, it's an easy way for those interested in our show to get exclusive content and updates before anyone else, along with a whole bunch of other "perks" just by contributing as little as $1 per month. Find out more here.. https://www.patreon.com/proaudiosuite George has created a page that is strictly for Pro Audio Suite listeners, so check it out for the latest discounts and offers for TPAS listeners. https://georgethe.tech/tpas If you haven't filled out our survey on what you'd like to hear on the show, you can do it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZWT5BTD Join our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/proaudiopodcast And the FB Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/357898255543203 For everything else (including joining our mailing list for exclusive previews and other goodies), check out our website https://www.theproaudiosuite.com/ “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.” Hunter S Thompson

This Morning, AI is getting a little scary with the accuracy, spring cleaning is here and we are rummaging through it in the Want Ads, Comedian Doug Stanhope joins us he will be at Helium Comedy Club tonight and tomorrow, and Andrew Peters is in studio! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X. Listen to past episodes on 97Rock. Follow the Show on Apple, Spotify or Amazon MusicSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This Morning, George Wallace is still going, we try to find some treasures in the Want Ads, check in with some of our Dyngus Day faithful & Andrew Peters joins us In Studio on the season's end & Playoffs! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X. Listen to past episodes on 97Rock. Follow the Show on Apple, Spotify or Amazon MusicSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This Morning, they're just throwing away weed at this point, we see where spring cleaning gets us in the Want Ads, UB Professor Jessica Kruger is in studio talking to us about cannabis research , we find out our Kink Bracket winner, and Andrew Peters is in studio to talk Sabres! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X. Listen to past episodes on 97Rock. Follow the Show on Apple, Spotify or Amazon MusicSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, we dive into one of the biggest and most talked-about voiceover events on the planet — VO Atlanta. Andrew, George, Robbo, and Robert break down the experience from every angle: Is it still the king of VO conferences? What's changed post-pandemic? Who should (and maybe shouldn't) be booking flights for next year? The good, the bad, and the “interesting” from this year's event Tips for getting the most out of VO Atlanta if you go in the future Plus, a little side chat about conferences in general — when are they worth it, when are they not, and how they could be better. Oh, and don't miss the usual dose of questionable humour, honest takes, and hard-earned industry insight.

JR and Tim welcome Andrew Peters and Craig Rivet from After The Whistle. They discuss the St. Louis Blues' impressive performance, Alex Ovechkin's goal-scoring record, and the Toronto Maple Leafs' chances of making a deep run in the playoffs. They also talk about the Buffalo Sabres' struggles and the importance of having influential alumni close to the team.

This Morning, Lil John Wick helps this kid from getting kidnapped, we head over to the Want Ads and also learn a few things about witches and wizards, and Andrew Peters joins us to talk Sabres & kinks! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X. Listen to past episodes on 97Rock. Follow the Show on Apple, Spotify or Amazon MusicSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

HOUR 1: ASTEROID01. Asteroid - Rapture [Afterdark]02. Asteroid - We Are Love [FSOE]03. Asteroid - Forever | Now [Deep Space Music]04. Asteroid - Flow State [FSOE]05. Zahzah - Adonis [Regenerate Records]06. Kinetica & Inversed - Atlas (Asteroid Remix)07. Asteroid - Voices of Gaia [Regenerate Records]08. Asteroid - Home [Afterdark]09. Stoneface & Terminal - North Cape (Asteroid Remix) [FSOE]10. Asteroid - Free [Nocturnal Knights Music]11. Asteroid - Catharsis [Regenerate Records]12. Will Rees x Asteroid - Exhilarate [Afterdark]HOUR 2: ED LYNAM01. Paul Denton - Around In Circles [FSOE]02. Rank 1 - Strobo (Deeper Dub Mix) [High Contrast Recordings (Be Yourself Music)]03. Marie Vaunt - Kiss My Acid [Kurai Records]04. Andrew Peters x Allen Watts Pres. Awaken - More Than Words 2025 [High Voltage Recordings]05. JTB Live - Mi Amor [HTE]06. Nostic - Living In Hyper Reality (Hard Mix) [Hyper Reality Records]07. D10 & GND - Justic (E-Klispe Remix) [Hyper Reality Records]08. DJ Husband - Torque [Dauntless Digital Black]09. MindTrick - I Want You Soul [Hard Trance Revolution Records]10. The Digital Devil - Ego Destruction [HTE]11. Mindflux - Overdosing' [Hard Trance Revolution Records]12. Renegade System - Delta Drama [Hard Trance Revolution Records]CLASSIC REMIX13. Interactive x Sasha Vastoff - Amok 2025 [HTE]

This week's episode of The Pro Audio Suite dives headfirst into the world of budget audio gear, exploring whether cheaper equipment has actually improved or if it's still just average kit with fancy marketing. Here are some key highlights and insights from the discussion: Budget Gear: Better or Still Rubbish? Robustness & Quality: The crew revisits the Rode NT1's evolution—from early plastic models to today's sturdy iterations. They ponder its surprising collectability today. User-Friendliness: A cheeky chat unfolds about how budget gear manufacturers should assume nothing when it comes to user knowledge, advocating for painfully obvious product instructions, especially with mics like Rode's NT1. Headphones: Still the Achilles Heel? Consensus emerges around headphones as one area where low-budget options haven't improved as dramatically as microphones. The crew reckons that decent studio cans rarely dip below the $100 mark without significant compromises in sound and build quality. Austrian Audio gets a shout-out for their entry-level headphones offering decent quality, but it's noted that paying a little more generally delivers much better audio. Interfaces and Converters: Robbo's downsized rig is highlighted, having moved from larger interfaces to compact solutions like the SSL2 and the Centrance PASport VO. An important insight shared is that cheap interfaces often share internal converter chips with much pricier gear, meaning the sonic differences can be surprisingly subtle. Bargain Finds and Bargain Fails: Andrew points out the rise in cost of entry-level interfaces from brands like Focusrite, thanks to feature-creep. The group chats about bargain-basement gear flooding Amazon, discussing surprising finds like a $30 dual XLR-to-USB-C interface cable. Robbo humorously advises caution, noting that certain inexpensive gear—particularly cables and mic arms—can still be absolute rubbish. Chinese Clones and Cheap Accessories: George brings up affordable Chinese-made hardware like camera mounts and mic arms, now significantly cheaper yet surprisingly robust compared to premium brands. The "magic arm" clamp is a notable budget win. However, the consensus firmly recommends against skimping on headphones and cables. Quality connectors from Neutrik and Mogami cables are touted as essentials worth investing in. Plug-ins: Stock vs. Premium vs. AI Debate surrounds stock plug-ins vs premium offerings, questioning the necessity of higher-priced plug-ins from brands like FabFilter. Healthy skepticism about AI-enhanced plug-ins and noise reduction is expressed, particularly regarding Adobe Podcast's AI noise reduction. Emulators & Mic Modeling: Opinions split on whether mic emulation is beneficial or just a feel-good factor. Townsend Sphere and Antelope Audio's mics spark a conversation about whether emulated models truly rival their inspirations. Final Thoughts: Cheaper gear today often does punch above its price tag compared to the past, especially microphones. But there remain clear lines where quality is non-negotiable (headphones, connectors, and build quality in general). Ultimately, the episode reinforces the idea that good engineering practice and knowledge still win the day, regardless of budget constraints. It's another lively, opinionated, and informative chat from Robbo, Andrew Peters, George "The Tech" Whittam, and Robert Marshall, brought to you by their sponsors Tribooth and Austrian Audio. If you're keen to catch the full flavour and all the banter, check out the episode at theproaudiosuite.com. A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth... https://tribooth.com/ And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear..  https://austrian.audio/ We have launched a Patreon page in the hopes of being able to pay someone to help us get the show to more people and in turn help them with the same info we're sharing with you. If you aren't familiar with Patreon, it's an easy way for those interested in our show to get exclusive content and updates before anyone else, along with a whole bunch of other "perks" just by contributing as little as $1 per month. Find out more here..   https://www.patreon.com/proaudiosuite     George has created a page that is strictly for Pro Audio Suite listeners, so check it out for the latest discounts and offers for TPAS listeners. https://georgethe.tech/tpas If you haven't filled out our survey on what you'd like to hear on the show, you can do it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZWT5BTD Join our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/proaudiopodcast And the FB Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/357898255543203 For everything else (including joining our mailing list for exclusive previews and other goodies), check out our website https://www.theproaudiosuite.com/ “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.” Hunter S Thompson  

TR was featured on Andrew Peter's Podcast, and shares his Interview with you all! Andrew Peters is a Canadian former professional ice hockey left winger. Peters played in the National Hockey League for the Buffalo Sabres, and the New Jersey Devils. Throughout his playing career, Peters was best known for his role as an enforcer. Andrew now hosts the After The Whistle Podcast. You can now watch episodes of Tales with TR on YouTube! Head over to https://www.youtube.com/@THPN to watch the latest episode Welcome to Tales with TR: A Hockey Podcast presented by The Hockey Podcast Network. Join former Montreal Canadiens' first-round draft pick & Shoresy star Terry Ryan, as he talks about the sport of Hockey, brings on various guests, and shares tales of his life and professional hockey career. Host: Terry Ryan @terryryan20 Network: @hockeypodnet Editor: Isha Jahromi - "The City Life Project" on Youtube Sponsored by: Draft Kings - Use promo code THPN at sign-up for exclusive offers https://tinyurl.com/DRAFTKINGSPROMOTHPN MAKE SURE YOURSELF/FRIENDS/FAMILY TO GO SIGN UP FOR A GAMETIME AND APPLY/"REDEEM CODE" USING PROMO CODE: THPN

This Morning, A Sabre on the side of a milk carton, there's spring cleaning going on in the Want Ads, Comedian Sam Morril joins us before heading to Helium Comedy Club tomorrow, and Andrew Peters joins us in studio this morning! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X. Listen to past episodes on 97Rock. Follow the Show on Apple, Spotify or Amazon MusicSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Exosphere Radio Episode 116 mixed by Tom Exo Tracklist: 01.Visua Feat. Ioshua - Decode [Divinity] 02.Madwave&Fros7novA - Sigma [Think Trance] 03.Taucher - Science Fiction (Helena Kristiansson&Jox Remix)[Future Sequence] 04.Conor Holohan - Inside [Dreamstate] 05.Ilyin&Darix - It's Time To Dream [Reason II Rise] 06.Submersive - Lifestream [Regenerate] 07.Sam Laxton - Under Control [HTE] 08.Mark Sherry&David Forbes - Superstition [Outburst] 09.Andrew Peters x Allen Watts Presents Awaken - More Than Words 2025 [High Voltage] 10.Manuel Le Saux - Chimera [Extrema] 11.UDM - Synergy [Activate] 12.Ralphie B&Frank Waanders Pres. Collide1 -Rave With Me [Find Your Harmony] 13.OWL. - Momentum [Reason II Rise Uplift] 14.Suncatcher&Exolight Pres. Sunlight State - Diversion [AVA White]

This Morning, a birthname like no other, spring cleaning is coming up so we browse through the Wants Ads, we speak with a former corrections officer to give us incite on the Wildcat Strike, and Andrew Peters is in studio with us talking all things Sabres Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X. Listen to past episodes on 97Rock. Follow the Show on Apple, Spotify or Amazon MusicSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

MGMT & BOOKINGS: info@luminary-artists.com Tracklist: 01. Intro [00:00] 02. Mauro Picotto aka CRW - I Feel Love [00:23] 03. Pulse & Sphere - Progressive [02:40] 04. Nifra - Acces Code [05:30] 05. David Forbes - Sidewinder [08:06] 06. Jochen Miller - Lost Connection (Dustin Husain Remix) [10:40] 07. Cosmic Boys - Hype [12:53] 08. Endica - Rave On [16:33] 09. RymszaK - Infinity [18:50] 10. Rank1 - Strobo (Deeper Dub) [20:40] 11. Ernesto vs Bastian - Thrill (South Of Stars Remix) [24:10] 12. Space 92 - Offbeat [27:35] 13. Karney - Delante [30:18] 14. Artento Divini x Brieanna Grace - High Heels 15. Talla 2XLC & Frankyeffe - Feel Alive [35:54] 16. ReOrder & Kristy Jay - Voices [37:47] 17. Maarten de Jong - Vigor [40:51] 18. Rusty Spice - Hypercube [42:54] 19. OnTune - Laserfather [48:05] 20. Andrew Peters x Allen watts Awaken - More Than Words 2025 [48:33] 21. Artento Divini x Allen Watts - Say What [51:08 22. Shugz - Double [53:58] 23. Simon Pitt - Entrez Dans La Lumiee [56:11]

This Morning, we visit the old school Want Ads before reading through what's for sale on Craigslist & Facebook Marketplace, and Andrew Peters is in the studio talking about the Sabres 3 game winning streak, and that hit Tage Thompson took during the Devils game over the weekend. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X. Listen to past episodes on 97Rock. Follow the Show on Apple, Spotify or Amazon MusicSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andrew joins us In Studio on a frigid morning with the age old question? Is It Ownership, The Management, Coaching or the Players?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This Morning, we have the worst thing you will hear all day, Patrick Hammer joins us to talk about these frigid temperatures and snow storm coming through, we head to the Want Ads to try to find some hidden treasures, the one who won Nate Burleson's coat Justin is on with us as we try to brainstorm how to get him to Kansas City, and Andrew Peters is in the studio to break down the Sabres & how they're playing. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X. Listen to past episodes on 97Rock. Follow the Show on Apple, Spotify or Amazon MusicSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This Morning, heading into NYC just got more expensive, we find some goodies in the Want Ads & Andrew Peters joins us In Studio. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X. Listen to past episodes on 97Rock. Follow the Show on Apple, Spotify or Amazon MusicSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andrew joins us In Studio on Brick Bar, the team pushing with half the season gone and someone looking for a Craig Rivet stick.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This Morning, a prank gone wrong, Andrew Peters from After the Whistle podcast joins us in studio, and we see what's for sale in the Want Ads. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.                                                                      Listen to past episodes on 97Rock.                                                                                Follow the Show on Apple, Spotify or Amazon MusicSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This Morning, tummies rumblin at a potluck in Maryland, we find some cheap items in bulk in the Want Ads, and Andrew Peters is in studio with us talking Sabres!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Duane and Hurls are joined by Host of the After the Whistle podcast and Sabres alumni Andrew Peters Lindy Ruff then vs now His feelings on Rob Ray being inducted into the Sabres HOF Experiences with Rayzor Kevyn Adams His proudest moment in hockey Current state of the Sabres and more! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts Presented by Fattey Beer Co. and Buff-A-Logo Apparel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Robbo, George, AP, and Robert Marshall take a deep dive into Waves' newest AI-driven plugin: Waves Curves Equator. It's an innovative EQ that analyzes your audio and creates custom EQ curves based on what it “hears.” We break down its features, test it on Andrew Peters' voiceover, and explore how it could change the way we handle EQ. Discussion highlights: How AI EQ works and its real-world applications Robbo's first impressions using Waves Curves Equator Automating EQ for radio imaging and other applications Will AI-driven plugins take over more of the audio workflow? We also explore some fun presets and discuss how AI might shape the future of audio production. Episode Links: Tribooth Discount Code: Use TRIPAP200 for $200 off Austrian Audio: Proud sponsor of the show Source Elements: Making remote production seamless Competition Alert! Submit your mix for a chance to win a pair of Austrian Audio Hi-X20 headphones. Whether you're a beginner or a pro, just have fun with it! Full details at www.proaudiosuite.com/win. See the video version of this episode here: https://youtu.be/kYbc9Dzz2yQ Show Notes Links: Enter the Austrian Audio Hi-X20 Headphone Giveaway Download the show stems and submit your mix Connect With Us: Join our Facebook Group Visit our Website Subscribe on YouTube A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth... https://tribooth.com/ And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear..  https://austrian.audio/ We have launched a Patreon page in the hopes of being able to pay someone to help us get the show to more people and in turn help them with the same info we're sharing with you. If you aren't familiar with Patreon, it's an easy way for those interested in our show to get exclusive content and updates before anyone else, along with a whole bunch of other "perks" just by contributing as little as $1 per month. Find out more here..   https://www.patreon.com/proaudiosuite     George has created a page strictly for Pro Audio Suite listeners, so check it out for the latest discounts and offers for TPAS listeners. https://georgethe.tech/tpas If you haven't filled out our survey on what you'd like to hear on the show, you can do it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZWT5BTD Join our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/proaudiopodcast And the FB Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/357898255543203 For everything else (including joining our mailing list for exclusive previews and other goodies), check out our website https://www.theproaudiosuite.com/ “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.” Hunter S Thompson

In this episode of The Pro Audio Suite, we're excited to announce an exclusive Austrian Audio Giveaway as part of our new Audio Mix Competition! Tune in as Robbo, Andrew Peters, George "The Tech" Whittam, and Robert Marshall share the details on how you can win a brand-new pair of the latest Austrian Audio headphones!

On this episode, the guys are joined by former Buffalo Sabres tough guy and podcast host of “After the Whistle” Andrew Peters. He joins us to talk about the lack of leadership from Buffalo ownership, how Jack Eichel and Ryan O'Reilly were treated, fighting goaltender Ray Emery, and much more. Before the interview, the boys get into TJ Oshie's career, Crosby's recent extension, and much more. Enjoy our chat with someone Cam fought in the past, Andrew Peters!Interview start: 1:28:40Check out our Sponsors!

In this episode, the Pro Audio Suite team dives deep into the world of USB microphones. Once considered a big no-no for professional audio work, USB mics have come a long way. But are they truly ready to replace traditional XLR setups? Join Robert Marshall, Darren "Robbo" Robertson, George "The Tech" Whittam, and Andrew Peters as they explore the pros and cons of USB mics, discuss technological advancements, and share personal experiences. Special thanks to our sponsors, Tribooth and Austrian Audio, for making this episode possible. Sponsors: Tribooth: The best vocal booth for home or on-the-road voice recording. Use code TRIPAP200 for $200 off your Tribooth. Austrian Audio: Making passion heard. Credits: Hosted by Robert Marshall, Darren "Robbo" Robertson, George "The Tech" Whittam, and Andrew Peters Recorded using Source Connect Edited by Andrew Peters Mixed by Voodoo Radio Imaging Tech support by George "The Tech" Whittam Don't forget to subscribe to the show and join the conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say g'day, drop us a note at theproaudiosuite.com. A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth... https://tribooth.com/ And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear..  https://austrian.audio/ We have launched a Patreon page in the hopes of being able to pay someone to help us get the show to more people and in turn help them with the same info we're sharing with you. If you aren't familiar with Patreon, it's an easy way for those interested in our show to get exclusive content and updates before anyone else, along with a whole bunch of other "perks" just by contributing as little as $1 per month. Find out more here..   https://www.patreon.com/proaudiosuite     George has created a page strictly for Pro Audio Suite listeners, so check it out for the latest discounts and offers for TPAS listeners. https://georgethe.tech/tpas If you haven't filled out our survey on what you'd like to hear on the show, you can do it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZWT5BTD Join our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/proaudiopodcast And the FB Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/357898255543203 For everything else (including joining our mailing list for exclusive previews and other goodies), check out our website https://www.theproaudiosuite.com/ “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.” Hunter S Thompson

This Morning, we're giving it the ol' Hawk Tuah, some rare finds are found in the Want Ads, Andrew Peters is in studio helping us wrap up the Stanley Cups, and AEW Wrestler Dan Garcia joins us in studio before his match at the Keybank Center tomorrow night!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our host Dr Cat Vendl chats with Dr Andrew Peters, past WDA president and Associate Professor in Wildlife Health and Pathology at Charles Sturt University in Australia. A small revolution is about to take place within the WDA and hopefully the world of conference-ing as we know it. Andrew is the main organizer and creative head of the upcoming international WDA conference taking place in Canberra in early December this year. What is it that will make this conference so special, you might wonder. Well, sit back, relax and listen for yourself.Check out the conference website to learn more here! Abstract submission closes on June 21!We'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.

Andrew joins us In Studio on the Stanley Cup finals, former Sabres in the finals & the reclusive Craigsquatch.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This Morning, You couldn't tell he wasn't garth Brooks in Opening Audio, ketchup and KitKats do NOT go together the way one would think, we see what treasures are hiding in the Want Ads, and Andrew Peters is in studio with us!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of The Pro Audio Suite, we dive into the results of our recent Facebook group poll on favourite microphones. From the Shure SM7B to the Sennheiser MKH 8060, we discuss the mics you love and why. Robbo, George, AP, and Robert share their insights on the top picks, including some surprising mentions like the Austrian Audio OC18 and the affordable Audio-Technica AT875R. We also touch on some great customer service stories from Sennheiser and explore the nuances of various microphone features and performance. Join us for a passionate discussion about the tools that shape our sound! Episode Highlights: Introduction and shout-outs to our sponsors: Tribooth and Austrian Audio. Overview of the Facebook group microphone poll. Detailed discussion of popular microphones including the Shure SM7B, Rode NT1A, Neumann TLM103, Audio-Technica AT2020, and the Sennheiser MKH 416. Insights into user preferences and experiences with these microphones. Special mention of the Austrian Audio OC18 and its popularity among listeners. George's recommendation of the Audio-Technica AT875R as an affordable shotgun mic alternative. Stories of exceptional customer service from Sennheiser. Discussion on the Sennheiser MKH 800 Twin and its advanced features. Encouragement for listeners to join the Facebook group and participate in the ongoing conversation. A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth... https://tribooth.com/ And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear..  https://austrian.audio/ We have launched a Patreon page in the hopes of being able to pay someone to help us get the show to more people and in turn help them with the same info we're sharing with you. If you aren't familiar with Patreon, it's an easy way for those interested in our show to get exclusive content and updates before anyone else, along with a whole bunch of other "perks" just by contributing as little as $1 per month. Find out more here..   https://www.patreon.com/proaudiosuite     George has created a page strictly for Pro Audio Suite listeners, so check it out for the latest discounts and offers for TPAS listeners. https://georgethe.tech/tpas If you haven't filled out our survey on what you'd like to hear on the show, you can do it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZWT5BTD Join our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/proaudiopodcast And the FB Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/357898255543203 For everything else (including joining our mailing list for exclusive previews and other goodies), check out our website https://www.theproaudiosuite.com/ “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.” Hunter S Thompson #ProAudioSuite #Microphones #AudioEngineering #Podcasting #Voiceover #SoundDesign #AudioProduction #MicReview #ProAudioTips #RecordingGear Y'all ready to be history? Get started. (0:02) Welcome. Hi.   Hi. Hi. Hello, everyone.   (0:05) To the pro audio suite. These guys are professional, they're motivated. (0:09) Thanks to Triboose, the best vocal booths for home or on the road voice recording.   (0:14) And Austrian Audio, making passion heard. (0:17) Introducing Robert Marshall from Source Elements and someone audio post Chicago. (0:22) Darren Robert Robertson from Voodoo Radio Imaging, Sydney.   (0:25) Next to the VO stars, George the Tech Whittem from LA. (0:28) And me, Andrew Pinkers, voiceover talent and home studio guy. (0:32) Line up, man.   Here we go. (0:36) And welcome to another pro audio suite. Thanks to Triboose.   (0:39) Don't forget that code, T-R-I-P-A-P 200 to get $200 off your booth. (0:45) And Austrian Audio, making passion heard. (0:48) We've had a bit of a passionate response to our new Facebook group, (0:52) which is the pro audio suite podcast group.   (0:56) And Rubbo threw up a survey about microphones, (1:00) which one people would like to use and do use and don't use. (1:04) Yeah, I just, I kind of figured a robust discussion about microphones is always well received. (1:10) So I figured I'd start one and it's only a small sample because we've only just started the group.   (1:15) But some of the results sort of had me thinking a bit. (1:18) So basically what I did was I did a poll. (1:20) And I didn't go with my favorites.   (1:23) I just went with the microphones that as a freelance audio engineer, (1:27) when I'm walking into other studios, I come across a lot. (1:30) And I stuck them up there with an option for people to put their own up there as well. (1:34) So the ones I put up were the SM7B, the NT1A, the TLM103, AT2020, 416, of course.   (1:43) And that was about it. (1:44) And then left it open for people to sort of put their own up. (1:48) And the question was, which one's your best mate? (1:51) So what's the microphone that you choose in your studio? (1:55) Now, I've got to be honest, I kind of did figure that the 416 would feature fairly heavily and it has.   (2:02) I mean, the 7B sort of comes in fairly close and the TLM103 are exactly the same in terms of response. (2:11) But then some of the ones in the comments were sort of interesting as well. (2:15) Well, the one I thought was interesting was someone jumped on to Bill.   (2:21) Now I've got to try and get his name right. (2:25) Bill Answa. Is that right? (2:26) Answa.   (2:27) Yeah, I think it's Bill Answa. (2:28) Anyway, sorry, Bill, if I got your name wrong. (2:31) He is using the Austrian audio OC18 into an SSL2.   (2:36) Well, someone's been listening to our podcast. (2:38) And is he using the 4K button? (2:40) He says. (2:41) Yes, he does.   (2:42) Yeah, he goes, yes, indeed. (2:44) Thanks for teaching me that. (2:44) Yeah, and Phil writes on the Lewitt, which doesn't feature fairly.   (2:49) Yeah, we mentioned it on the show, but I don't see it a lot. (2:55) What else was the other one? (2:56) What's the 875R? What's that, a shotgun? (3:00) It's an excellent, excellent bargain shotgun mic. (3:05) Is it? (3:05) Right.   (3:05) It's the one that you recommend, George, isn't it? (3:07) It's so good. (3:08) Like, it's only Achilles heel is that it's not the quietest mic. (3:12) Self-noise is, you know, not as good as a 416.   (3:15) But it's a damn good substitute. (3:18) You know, it sounds similar. (3:20) I have one.   (3:21) So one of these days we'll pull it out and we'll compare it. (3:23) Yeah, I'd love to hear it. (3:25) But it sounds similar.   (3:26) It's not quite as large. (3:28) It's sort of like a short shotgun. (3:30) Is the polar pattern as tight as a 416? (3:32) I would say no.   (3:33) I would definitely say it's not as tight at all. (3:37) It's a more, nowhere near sophisticated mic. (3:40) It doesn't have that very complex line tube interference design.   (3:45) Yeah. (3:45) So anyway, it's a very simple mic, but it just sounds good. (3:49) And they're always under 200 US, 175 maybe.   (3:53) So that one's a... (3:54) 169 B? (3:55) That one's a great value. (3:56) And we've been recommending it a lot to folks who want a stunt mic. (4:00) Well, this is an interesting one from Jeff Berlin.   (4:03) Obviously the obligatory 416. (4:06) But he also has a Bosch or Soundalux U195. (4:10) I don't know that microphone.   (4:12) What do you say? (4:12) I have a Soundalux U99. (4:15) And it is basically a clone of a U67 using an actual EF86 tube. (4:22) And the Soundalux mics became Bach.   (4:25) Yeah, that's right. (4:27) Yeah. (4:28) And they are pretty high-end mics.   (4:30) They got bought by Universal Audio. (4:32) Yeah, that's correct. (4:33) Oh, really? (4:33) Yeah.   (4:33) Wow, that's too bad? (4:35) Is that too bad? (4:36) I don't know. (4:36) I don't know. (4:37) I mean... (4:38) It's kind of weird.   (4:38) I thought they bought Sphere microphones. (4:40) They had to buy all of them microphone companies. (4:42) So I threw all the mics that were in the comments, I think, into the survey.   (4:46) So it's easier to see. (4:49) And it's going to make it easier for people to continue voting. (4:51) But did you see anything that surprised you here? (4:55) Not me.   (4:55) Nothing really. (4:56) I mean, there's certainly plenty of ones that you don't see regularly in professional studios, (5:01) not that that means jack shit. (5:02) Because in a professional studio, you're looking for a workhorse that will do a whole bunch (5:07) of things, I guess, especially in post-production houses, as opposed to music studios.   (5:13) There's just no representation of a PZM mic here. (5:16) Come on. (5:17) There's no crown PZMs? (5:19) Oh, man.   (5:21) Like, turn my wall into the microphone. (5:22) Yeah, that's right. (5:24) The MK4, the Sennheiser, what's an MK4? (5:27) It's like a lower end shotgun.   (5:29) No, actually, no. (5:30) It's their entry-level side address LCD. (5:34) Large diaphragm.   (5:35) Oh, okay. (5:36) Large diaphragm. (5:37) It's like, I mean, I think in character, it's somewhere very similar to a TLM102 or (5:43) 103.   (5:44) It's in that range. (5:45) Is it kind of like the AKG perception? (5:48) Kind of. (5:48) It's like that zone.   (5:50) But I mean, it's not that cheap. (5:51) It's still a $400 mic. (5:54) I think it's more like a two.   (5:56) Oh, it's used. (5:57) Maybe it's used $200. (5:59) Yeah, maybe.   (6:00) I mean, Guitar Center's got them, but maybe those are used. (6:02) But Sweetwater's trying to sell it for $400. (6:05) How much is an AKG perception? (6:07) LDC.   (6:08) I don't know. (6:08) They're quite a bit cheaper, like 200 range. (6:13) So, yeah, the Sennheiser MK4 is not bad at all.   (6:15) There's quite a few people who have those. (6:17) Well, speaking of Sennheiser, just as an aside, Chris McCallum, who we've (6:22) had on the show, he's probably one of Australia's best known location (6:25) recordists, put up a post about his Sennheiser. (6:30) He says, I have an interesting occurrence with a 10 year old Sennheiser (6:35) MKH8060 shotgun mic.   (6:36) One day it stopped working without warning and only issued a static (6:40) frequency. (6:41) I've taken it to Sennheiser's service and they've discovered that they are (6:44) unable to open the mic as the special screws holding the electronics (6:47) inside the barrel are completely seized. (6:49) They say they can see no sign of corrosion, but are unable to open (6:52) the mic, sort of shoring it open.   (6:54) What has surprised me is they have offered to take possession of this (6:57) mic and offer me a brand new one for an exchange of $700. (7:01) These mics now retail for well over $2,300. (7:04) So, I'm very happy with the outcome.   (7:07) So, this is now the second new exchange I've had since the (7:10) original purchase, as there was a recall in the very early serial (7:13) numbers. (7:13) So, it was replaced then as well. (7:15) I can't really fault their response and commitment to their brand.   (7:18) So, hey, that's... (7:18) Did you see my response on that? (7:21) No. (7:22) What's yours? (7:22) What did you say on that? (7:23) But they're charging him... (7:24) I was the original recording of the screws falling out. (7:30) They're basically saying they'll do the repair for $700.   (7:33) So, they're basically giving him a brand new mic for $700, yeah. (7:36) As the repair? (7:37) As the repair, I guess, yeah. (7:39) I'd say yes if it came with a one year warranty.   (7:41) Right. (7:42) At least. (7:42) Or whatever the new warranty is, I guess.   (7:45) It's a bit of a bummer though. (7:47) But yeah. (7:48) I had a similar thing.   (7:49) I actually had a similar thing happen with my 416. (7:52) It was an old one and it was playing up, (7:55) I sent it into Sennheiser and they kind of said, (7:57) look, we can fix it, but it's probably going to cost, (8:00) you know, almost the same price as a... (8:02) Probably about half the cost of a new one. (8:05) And then they... (8:06) Yeah.   (8:07) But then they sort of said, look, you can fix it, (8:09) but we can't guarantee it because it is old (8:11) and there's components could let go. (8:13) Then did me a cracking deal on a new 416. (8:17) Nice.   (8:17) As long as the mic wasn't cracking, that's a good deal. (8:19) Yeah, exactly. (8:20) Well, the first one was, the second one wasn't.   (8:23) Are you making fun of this London accent? (8:25) So, that's 8060 is a step up from the 416 in terms of... (8:28) Yeah, it looks like it. (8:29) Yeah, yeah. (8:30) Better signal response, maybe.   (8:32) Yeah. (8:33) The 8000 series is sort of their... (8:35) That's their new flagship line. (8:38) You know, small diaphragm mics in the head.   (8:40) Did Chris mention it in the episode when we had him on? (8:42) I feel like he did. (8:44) I feel like he's sort of go to mine. (8:46) Yeah, yeah.   (8:46) But see, Chris doesn't have a microphone locker. (8:49) He has a microphone walk-in wardrobe. (8:52) Yes, exactly.   (8:53) That's right. (8:55) Yeah. (8:56) He's the Imelda Marcos of microphones.   (8:59) I think Sennheiser makes a sight address version in that 8000 series. (9:03) It's multi-pattern and it's like $4000, (9:06) but it's supposed to be really excellent. (9:08) You know what I'm talking about? (9:09) 800.   (9:10) Is it the 800? (9:11) Is that what it is? (9:11) It's a really odd little mic. (9:13) It's very small. (9:16) And let's see if I can share.   (9:18) No, it's a multi-pattern. (9:19) It's not the little small tiny ones. (9:21) I know, but it's really small.   (9:23) I mean, I saw it at NAB. (9:25) I was like, oh my God, that thing's tiny. (9:28) I think I saw your video.   (9:29) I'm looking at the MKH 800 Twin. (9:34) This is a new model of microphone they just launched. (9:36) This is a different animal completely from what you're describing.   (9:40) This one's 3200. (9:43) And it is their variable pattern mic where you just simply... (9:48) What's that? (9:49) MKH 800 Twin? (9:51) Yeah, this is it right here. (9:52) I have it on screen, I think.   (9:54) Maybe. (9:54) There it goes. (9:56) There it is.   (9:57) Look at that sexy baby. (9:58) Quite spendy. (9:59) This picture doesn't show... (10:01) Well, you see how small it is by... (10:02) Because you can see the XLR barrel.   (10:05) The tail, it's small. (10:06) It almost looks like a mic port pro, the original one. (10:09) It is like the old KM86.   (10:13) The Neumann KM86, which is a side address, multi-pattern, small diaphragm mic that people go kind of gaga over. (10:21) Well, that's quite a spendy mic, 3200. (10:24) Which is two symmetrical push-pull... (10:28) It's a dual diaphragm.   (10:31) Is it dual output too? (10:33) Like, could we use it with our... (10:34) Yeah, so the way it works is you simply pot up and down the other capsule, and that's how you go. (10:40) So it's like... (10:41) But do you have a separate output of the other capsule so we can run it into our new software that you and I have purchased? (10:47) Right. (10:49) Yeah, it is quite a spendy mic.   (10:53) You know, it's so funny. (10:54) I have video of me interviewing the Sennheiser rep at NAB on YouTube, and someone's like, (10:59) Hey, isn't that Julian Kraus standing right behind him? (11:05) It was Julian Kraus standing behind you. (11:08) It was, it was like I missed an opportunity to chat with him.   (11:11) Oh, I saw it when I saw your video. (11:13) I saw him in the background. (11:14) He was having a look at the mics as well.   (11:15) Is that Julian Kraus? (11:17) I'm like, son of a gun, it is. (11:19) There are so many YouTubers at NAB, of course, you know. (11:22) I saw a couple, they were always like in transit, you know, but I would love to send hello to Julian (11:28) and thank him for his unbelievable commitment to very, very consistent and dry videos about audio interfaces.   (11:38) He's like the equivalent of the Sahara desert for YouTubers. (11:42) It is so freaking dry. (11:43) Yeah, but it's useful.   (11:46) And big. (11:46) You know, we're the polar opposite, really, aren't we? (11:50) Exactly. (11:51) And in fact, on that note, if you do want to vote for one of these microphones or tell us what you have, (11:56) go to your Facebook and or the Facebook, as I saw people call it, and look for the Pro Audio Suite podcast group (12:05) and you'll find the thread down there somewhere.   (12:07) Not the page, the group. (12:08) Yeah, the group. (12:09) We can even pin that, I think.   (12:11) Maybe it might be a way to pin it. (12:12) Well, I will. (12:13) I'll pin it to the top of our Facebook page.   (12:14) Oh, I can do it right now. (12:15) Oh, you can do that. (12:16) There you go.   (12:17) Pin the feature. (12:18) There you go. (12:18) So yes.   (12:19) Done. (12:20) Out. (12:21) Pinned.   (12:24) Pinned. (12:25) So that was fun. (12:27) Is it over? (12:29) The Pro Audio Suite.   (12:30) Thanks to drivers and Austrian Audio, recorded using Sauce Connect, edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Blue Doo Radio Imaging. (12:41) Don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group or leave a comment, suggest a topic or just say kiddo. (12:48) Drop us a note at our website

This Morning, we've got spam mail, we see what homemade art is waiting for us in the Want Ads, Andrew Peters joins us in studio, and we remember Bill Watson and Richard Sherman. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This Morning, we start off early with a jackass, we head over to Craigslist and FB Marketplace to see what's for sale in the Want Ads, Andrew Peters is in studio with us, and Brandon from West Herr talks to us about some exciting events coming up!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This Morning, Oil Barrons in Nashville, we head to the Want Ads to see what's for sale, [BN]'s Samantha Christman joins us as we talk about the closing of the Boulevard Mall, and Andrew Peters joins us!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this special episode of The Pro Audio Suite, join hosts Robbo, Andrew, and George as they dive deep into the latest advancements in remote collaboration technology with Source Connect Four. Joined by special guests Rebecca, Ross, and Vincent from Source Elements, the team discusses the game-changing features and improvements that make Source Connect Four a must-have tool for audio professionals. The episode kicks off with introductions and sets the stage for an in-depth discussion on Source Connect Four. Celebrating the recent accolades and advancements in remote collaboration with Source Connect Four, the team explores the groundbreaking features, including the Auto Restore/Replace function, which has been improved and made more user-friendly. They also delve into the future integrations with Nexus and other platforms, promising further enhancements for audio professionals. Discover how Remote Overdub Sync revolutionizes the overdub process, ensuring seamless synchronization in remote recording sessions. Exciting news for iOS users! Learn about the upcoming iOS compatibility for Source Connect Four. Wrapping up with congratulations and gratitude, the team reflects on the insightful discussion and looks forward to the future of remote collaboration in the audio industry. Tune in and stay ahead of the game with Source Connect Four, the ultimate solution for remote audio production! A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth... https://tribooth.com/ And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear..  https://austrian.audio/ We have launched a Patreon page in the hopes of being able to pay someone to help us get the show to more people and in turn help them with the same info we're sharing with you. If you aren't familiar with Patreon, it's an easy way for those interested in our show to get exclusive content and updates before anyone else, along with a whole bunch of other "perks" just by contributing as little as $1 per month. Find out more here..   https://www.patreon.com/proaudiosuite     George has created a page strictly for Pro Audio Suite listeners, so check it out for the latest discounts and offers for TPAS listeners. https://georgethe.tech/tpas If you haven't filled out our survey on what you'd like to hear on the show, you can do it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZWT5BTD Join our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/proaudiopodcast And the FB Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/357898255543203 For everything else (including joining our mailing list for exclusive previews and other goodies), check out our website https://www.theproaudiosuite.com/ “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.” Hunter S Thompson   loading Summary In this podcast, the Source Elements team celebrates their success and discusses the latest updates to Source Connect 4, including support for Dolby Atmos, improved user interface, and the Restore Replace feature. The software has been redesigned to simplify remote connections and enhance the user experience. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of remote recording technology, making it a necessity in the audio industry. The podcast also explores the potential integration of Source-Connect and Nexus, as well as the benefits of Source-Connect's remote overdub sync system. Finally, the host expresses gratitude to various individuals as the show concludes. #SourceConnect4 #DolbyAtmos #RemoteCollaboration loading loading Timestamps (00:00:00) Source Elements Wins NAB Best in Show (00:01:40) Source Connect 4: Dolby Atmos Support (00:05:52) Source Connect 4: Improved User Experience (00:08:36) Recorded Files in Pro Tools (00:10:08) Port Forwarding Simplified in Source Connect 4 (00:11:10) COVID's Impact on Remote Recording Technology (00:16:11) Streamlining Remote Audio Engineering (00:20:03) The Future of Source-Connect and Nexus (00:22:27) Remote Overdub Sync in Source-Connect (00:24:27) Farewell and Gratitude Transcript : Y'all ready? Beat history. : Get started. : Welcome. : Hi. Hi, hi. Hello, everyone to the pro audio suite. These guys are professional. They're motivated. : Thanks to Tribooth, the best vocal booth for home or on the rote voice recording and austrian audio making passion heard. Introducing Robert Marshall from source elements and someone audio post Chicago, Darren Robbo Robertson from voodoo radio imaging, Sydney tech to the Vo stars, George the tech Wittem from LA and me, Andrew Peters. Voice over talent and home studio line up learner. : Here we go. : And welcome to another pro audio suite. Thanks to tributh. Don't forget the code Tripap 200 to get $200 off your tributh. And austrian audio making passion heard. Just imagine a New Zealander, an American, a Canadian, an Australian and a half Englishman walk into a podcast. It's just happened. We have, apart from Robert Marshall, we have Rebecca Wilson, we have Ross and we have Vincent from source elements. : Ooh, here we are. : Wonderful. : An Argentine too. : Can you talk from our laughter who is here? : Yeah. : And welcome to the party in Las Vegas, by the sounds of it. : Now, we should say the award winning team. : Yeah, I was going to say there's a bit of a party going on because there's a new trophy in the cupboard. By the sounds of things, there is best in show. : We're holding it up right now. It's brilliant. Shining blue and it says, nab. Best in show. And it's gonna go under Robert's trophy case. : Exactly. I don't have a trophy case, but I have a trophy shelf. : Trophy shelf, yeah. : So, Phyllis, in best in show for. : Remote collaboration, remote production. Yes. : This is the new baby source connect four. Yeah. : Yes, it does. Atmos, amongst other many cool things, source Connect used to do and more than it does now. : So go and fill us in on the atmos thing because that's a massive leap forward. : Yeah. It allows you to have all sort of the raw atmos stream, so not just a rendered mix going across a remote connection, so someone can listen, but instead it gives you the flexibility to send what's called the bed. Then all the objects, these are all separate audio channels, as many as it will be, as many as 128 and the time code. And then most importantly, the metadata that steers all these objects around so that whatever the receiver has, as Atmos does, is it just conforms it. It renders it specifically for their speaker setup. So you could have a stage mixing a film with, say, 20 speakers and a director reviewing that mix in real time over source connect with, say, twelve speakers or even ten speakers. And maybe another person's connected at the same time and they just have headphones. So they're getting it as binaural. : It takes a lot of the thinking out of the equation, right? You just let the renderer on the remote side deal with the translation. So just lets the host, or the mix host, if you will, put one stream up and have it divvy out to everyone accordingly. : So everybody's end basically decides what it's. What it wants to hear. : Exactly. : Yeah. : Right. : Well, no, they'll hear the same thing. They'll just experience it in spatialization differently. : It'll be optimized for their speaker set up because it'll be coming out of a renderer directly on their side and. : The spatialization would be compatible from what you hear in binaural or 5.1. It's what someone's hearing in nine 1.6. But just with that lesser detail, I. : Guess the end goal is sort of like listening parity, which is almost impossible to achieve because everyone's going to have different speakers and configurations. But this is the most optimized version to get closest to that. : It's not like we're dropping like, you know, one of the voice channels so you only hear one side of the conversation. : It's the purpose that Atmos was made for so that there'd be one deliverable and then whatever your speaker set up. The person with the really nice speaker setup doesn't have to compromise for the person with the really simple speaker setup. : And the other way around. : And the other way around. The other person with a simple setup is not sort of burdened, in a sense, by having something that they can't play because of someone who has a really fancy system. So Atmos is like a deliverable that lets you play back anything from stereo all the way up to, you know, huge speakers arrays and 15 and 20 speakers even at home. : I think I have kind of an alternate kind of take on this which is basically like a bit of a tangent from that, that angle of it, but it's basically like these. Getting into a really tuned listening environment is a really expensive moment. You only get so many hours in there and the ability that now you could be working on a laptop in headphones through the Dolby Atmos renderer and building a mix towards your big mix session where you're going to actually sit in that room. That's kind of like what I think is at stake. And what's really exciting about this is you could be working on 5.1 before when you were working like in a stereo setting is you weren't able to know that it was going to translate. Exactly. This is kind of, or even at. : All, you kind of use tools like I had the, the waves thing that lets you take five one and make it binaural and you'd kind of have an idea. : I think most engineers I know would say they do their best work when like they, the client leaves and they get to work on something by themselves in a bit. So now the ability that you could be working towards this grand big spatial mix in a laptop setting and then transmit that to a listening environment that you can get into or physically get there, that's the real exciting prospect. : It kind of feels like equity, really like true equity. : Let's bring it back into more of the realm of our listeners, I guess. And AP and I have been having a bit of a play around with source connect four. Thanks very much to you guys. And the biggest step forward I see is firstly the GUI. You know, it looks so much more SmIc, so much more professional, so much more user friendly. But in terms of operation wise, the biggest step forward is the old queue manager, which now becomes restore replace. In source connect four we were like. : You know, we've spent 20 years honing technology and then we thought now we need to hone the user experience. It's really an internal focus for all of us. : Now the queue manager so often was just, people never read the manual. It didn't, it didn't work automatically enough. And then people would just go, what is this thing? I don't know. Shut it down, let's get on with our session. It wasn't something that they thought to ask for because they never had anything like it before. : It's weird, I've done so many sessions where I've said, are you using Q manager? And I get the answer, no. What's that? : Yeah, we just have one extra step to go, which is to be reading your session file automatically, your pro tools or logic or other session file, whatever we can. And then you honestly wouldn't have to do anything. And you've got restore happening all the time without needing to configure anything. : For me, the other awesome one would be for it to work even after I've shut down source connect because there's so many times that you shut it down and you go, oh, I shouldn't have done that, should I? : But you know, well we have reconnection logic built in now or like a new method where you know, if somebody does shut down, you still got work to do, you can bring it back up and it'll reconnect and it will restart. But we also, you know, if you shut the program down, then it can't do it anymore. That's the same. : But as far as, like, uploading the data maybe ahead of time or right away so you don't have to wait for the talent or worry if the talent shuts their system down. : This is maybe the most important thing about source page four. We've redesigned it from scratch, completely rewritten every line of code so that we can add these features that we know everybody wants. So the plan was the very first version on the first day. It's pretty much feature to feature for source connect three because we just need to get it out. : Right? : Yeah. : With doggy connection. : Okay. All right. Some more extra cool stuff. : There's a lot of cool stuff to. : Get you to want to upgrade, but then what you're talking about, like, hey, let's upload, you know, the whole session to the cloud so that the engineer can get it later on. All of that stuff can come now because with built hooks into all of this technology. : Sure. Well, let's pick through a few of them. AP and I were talking, we were looking at that restore replace page. AP noted the recorded files area and was wondering if that was sort of a hybrid of the old source connect now where you could actually record directly to the cloud. Is that the case, or is that actually looking at my. Well, in my case, my pro tools folder going, these are the files you've recorded so far. : Exactly. Those are the files that you've recorded in Pro tools. What I would originally say the Qmanager or the auto restore. Auto replace system recognizes as ones that it knows what they are and who they were connected to. And if there's any audio to fix or replace, restore or replace that it can do it. So those are your recorded files. And then the other one you might see in there is the uploads, which are files that maybe someone else recorded that you are uploading data to, to either restore someone else's file or replace data in someone else's file. : Okay. Because I think AP, you sort of liked the idea of recording in the cloud, didn't you? : Yeah, that's one of those features you're. : Technically recording there, and we can make that recording more available. It's actually, I think source connect three had that, but it had some flaws to it. But exporting the connection, if it's not there already, will be there. : AP has been playing with twisted wave too much. That's the problem I've been playing. : Yeah, indeed. Just going to ask about port forwarding. How does that change? Or has it changed in source connect four? : I got this one. How does that change? No more port forwarding is necessary. : Yeah. Nice. : Basically. : We find a way through your connection path and make it work. You don't have to go into your router and figure out anything complicated. You don't have to call us in a panic. You decided to take a vacation, and then you get called for a job. But nothing like that. It's just gonna work. : So source stream is available. Mac and windows. And port forwarding, especially in the pro version, is available if you want to use it. It does kind of. It's the ideal path for the connection, if it's available. And if you can lay out the red carpet for source connect, it appreciates it, but it's no longer required. : Only very strict networks and, you know, corporate environments. : Yeah. : My question is directed at you, Rebecca, and I'm wondering what hand COVID played in the development of source connect four, the one we're seeing now. : You know, it's still a complicated thing to process. What happened to the world in 2020? We all changed. It was a one of major cultural shift for them, us as humans. And so, of course, that can only be reflected in technology. And the main thing that changed, I would say, for us, is that we realized we kind of know what we're doing with the Internet, which was really nice to find out. It was really, you know, it wasn't a pleasant situation at all, but it was nice to know that we were able to help. That was really satisfying. If you could have called anything in that situation satisfying. And then it said to us, hey, I think that we have an idea what's gonna be needed the next 1020 years, because we've already been doing it 20 years. You know, Robert and I, the team are all young spring chickens, and. : And I have a cane. : We've still got some ideas left. I don't know, maybe just a certain insight that we have from doing this so long. It was like, now the world's ready for us. : I think what happened in the pandemic is a. All the doubters went, oh, remote really does work. And for us, what we realize is that remote is no longer just like the talent's remote or the client's remote, but remote is everybody's remote, and they all have different roles. And how to put those roles together in the most cohesive way became more what SourceConnect four was about compared to what we thought source connect four was going to be prior to the pandemic. : If you think about source Connect, like source Connect pre COVID was something that was nice to have, and then when COVID hit, it was something you had to have, and that changed the whole game. : I thought, well, Andrew, honestly, you and I, you know, we're from the South Pacific, from Australasia. I wouldn't say that source connect was a nice to have. It was kind of a, you know, whether it was source to nature or something else, we had to have something or how on earth we were going to work internationally because plane tickets are expensive and, you know. : Yeah, that's. : I think. : I think so, yeah. But I'm thinking from my point of view, like, as a voice talent, working with studios like you, historically, you just drive it. I go to Melbourne or Sydney or whatever it was for a job. And, you know, you managed to convince people that, you know, you can actually connect with to my studio if I work with someone in Sydney or wherever. But it was kind of a luxury, really. And people would just use local talent, pull up in their car park and go into their booth. But once COVID hit, it was not like that at all. It was a different game. : I think, especially here in Australia, there was a massive resistance to home studios, to the point where owners of studios would refuse to work with remote voice actors because they figured they were trying to steal their work. So. But COVID sort of put a whole new perspective on that, I guess, really, didn't it? : Yeah, and there were people. There were people that were actually literally coming out and black banning talent for having a home set up. : Yeah, that guy's got a home studio. He's stealing my work. : Prior to, like, up to. Prior to the pandemic, or did that subside at some point? : Yeah, I think it was. Look, it was. It was softening, but it was still there. : I think what the pandemic did is kind of shift the focus from the studio to the operator to the engineers at those studios. Right. So I definitely spoke to a lot of people in those places that said they got more work because they were able to do so much of it remotely. : Well, I know that's a fact for a lot of studios where they were able to, like, have engineers at home and at the studios, or just because clients weren't in, they were able to do just more work. Like, yeah, everybody could be put to work. All you needed was more licenses of whatever it was that you were using, like. Like pro Tools and Source connect and whatnot. : Yeah. : The irony of this whole thing. When COVID hit, all of a sudden studios were calling me because they had to get out of their commercial studios and set up at home and asking if I could do tests with them to make sure their source connect was working. : Wow. : Right. Or weren't some talent going to your place just to do sessions? Because they were, you know, they couldn't go all the way to the studio, but somehow they could give you COVID. : Exactly. : I don't know how the rules were, but I seem to remember you were hosting some talent at your place. : Yeah, there was a few that came here because they got out of the city and they were living sort of coastal, so they couldn't get in there anyway. And I was asked if people could come here that were living locally, and of course I obliged. : The amount of tech that was pushed on to pretty much every operator in a remote setting was, I think, probably one of the humbling parts of the pandemic. Right. Because, you know, it was, it was once you have every role get remote, then all of a sudden, like, I know a lot of audio engineers that know nothing about networks. Yeah. You know, like, it's like literally everyone has kind of thrown this wrench of technology and different roles now I got to be it as well as engineering. Well, that's what support was here for. : Yeah, I mean, I was just thinking like literally a big part of like source connect helping in pandemic was just a huge heavy load of tech support. And it wasn't just getting talent on boarded, but it was almost teaching a lot of people like how to work remotely or how to like not just do a remote ISDN, like to freaking have everybody be remote and lots of people routing. Yes. : So you know, all that's kind of, I think that's what source connect four represents. I think a lot of the learning of that is how to streamline exist, make the UI, make it make sense for you so you don't really need to think too much. The getting rid of the eye lock and the port forwarding requirements. I don't know if we talked about ilock, that's the thing. We've experienced that probably in huge volumes right at the start of the pandemic. : What's this? : What is this Iloc thing? : I need something physical and I can't. : Go out and get it. : You didn't need it physical at the time. Another account? Is it going to cost me anything? No, it's a free account and you know, you can't verify or you can't easily set somebody up because there's just more email verifications for new accounts that are created and God forbid the account that you created in source elements, that same account name is not available in Ilog. So now you have two different account names to remember and like two different passwords and. : Yeah, and people are losing their passwords because they use one thing for one account, one thing for another account. : So that's gone. : No more eyelock. : Wow, you heard it here first. : You heard it here, folks. That's right. Exactly. : Breaking news. : Bravo did say that he would like the UI to be bigger. : Bigger, small. : Can't see shit. : Smaller the GUI. : Oh, smaller the GUI. : It would be nice to be able to scale it like I want to see. I love the size of it as it is for now, but even when you've hit that little four corner box and it squashes down to the sort of send and receive meters and then the menu underneath, for me, it still takes up a lot of space on my screen. : And you can make it smaller. Yeah, you can grab the corner and push it in. : We're in the final mile of quality of life improvements. A lot of the stuff that, you know, those sort of smaller bits are just, they're gonna get done in the next couple months and. : Absolutely, I mean, you've embarked on a massive job. But that was one of the observations that I sort of, I did say to rob, but is I wanna see it big when I'm setting up the session and when I'm getting everybody connected. But once everybody's connected, I've got three screens in front of me, I've got my edit on one, my mix on another, and then my third is dedicated to picture for video. Source connect plugins, meters, all the rest of it to keep them out of the way. So the less space that can take up for me, because I really only need to glance up and see if it's metering. If someone says they can't hear something. : Can I throw in a future feature that I don't think is a spoiler because I really wanted. Yep, we plan to separate the UI from the engine and you could run it from like another screen or an iPad. And to me that's the sweet spot there, especially for, you know, people who are running, you know, big installations. They can walk away and, you know, oh, source Kinect five is not working and they can look on their phone. Oh yeah, oh, it's working now. : Right. : Why should they have to go back. : To the machine room and what about integration with Nexus? : I think you're going to definitely see Nexus and source connect integration and just further integration across the whole product line going towards that platform. : I think because I was telling Robert on a previous episode, it wasn't all that long ago, I had a session where I had a voice talent up in Brisbane somewhere. I had a creative sitting in the airport and two guys in the agency here in Sydney, and then the client was also online from, like, Perth in Western Australia or something like that. And there was another talent in Adelaide and it was this massive session. And if you could have seen my poor old thirst screen with meters and everything else going and all the rest of it, it becomes a logistical nightmare trying to remember where you've put everything and who's on what. So combining that all together would be quite impressive. : Can't say exactly what you might see, but I think sort of connect and nexus are surely more communication. : Well, that's actually a really good advancement that you've reminded me that you've, you've put into four. Here is the fact that all your connections appear in the one place. I think that's, that's amazing. : And they cross connect for you. : Yeah. : So they all hear each other without you having to do a thing. : Right. : You can pull multiple outputs, everyone record on everyone on a separate track, and. : You can even give them different inputs. : Right. : Right. You can send them different things, but they will all send to each other. : Yeah. : Can I make it so that person doesn't send to that person? : That's the plan for sure. We want to have a more project based style where you could decide what role is everyone playing? What do they hear? What do you hear? : What do you want them to hear? Who hears what? You can make everyone hear each other in a round circle and you could really play the game of like, tell this story to the next person and when it gets back to you. That is not the story I told. : Yeah, well, it's. I mean, the way you've set it up now, it's almost a well and truly upsized source connect now, right? : I'd agree. In a simple sense, it is like source connect three and source connect now. Sort of merging together and becoming each one, giving the best of what they used to do so you get the benefits. Yeah. : The autorestore replace being like, now you actually truly have an acquisition system that's like, bit accurate, right? : Yeah, yeah, exactly. : Never mind the browser, you're not going to get that there. : We know where every sample and frame is. : Speaking of frames, we have a system called remote Overdub sync which instead of remote transport sync where you are to deal with latency on a project. If someone is singing or doing ADR, going back to ISDN, the original method is to send timecode into sync. Two timelines on either side. So one chases the other networks, but there's a lot of setup on either side. So the remote overdub sync ideas that you can send to the talent whatever they need to hear and whatever they need to see and they perform if it's ADR and they sing and that performance gets back to you and you record it. And while you're recording it using the remote over dub sync system, you hear it in sync and when you hit stop in your daw, you see the waveform and then a moment later, a couple of seconds later, you see that waveform jump back in time to be where it should have been had there been no latency between you. So you can overdub, really just connect and overdub. You don't have to tell people to load up this timeline and click this button to synchronize. : No more comments of that doesn't look right to me from the back of the room. When you're recording with the talent, are. : You thinking or is it going to happen for iOS by any chance? : Oh yeah. : Yes. : I'm a big icad fan. I really love mine. I use it mostly as a music score player to play piano and I would love to use source connect on it and it's definitely happening. : AP is only asking you because he's trying to create the world's smallest voiceover roadkit. It's a purely selfish motivation. : I get it. : He just needs to use a trrs cable. And like, if Andrew just needs to talk to me about how to make things. : Uh huh. Absolutely. You would have the world's smallest road case. Indeed. : That's not the only thing that I've got the smallest of, but that's another story for another day. Thank you guys. Thank you Rebecca. Thank you Ross. Thank you Vincent. And of course Robert. : Congratulations. Congrats. : Thank you. : Thanks Andrew. Thanks, Jorge. : Well, that was fun. : Is it over? : The pro audio suite with thanks to Tribu and austrian audio recorded using Source Connect, edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Voodoo Radio Imaging from George the tech Wittem. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say g'day. Drop us a note at our website, thepro audiosuite.com. #ProAudioSuite #SourceConnectFour #RemoteRecording #AudioProduction #Podcasting #AudioEngineering #Podcasters #VoiceOver #PodcastProduction #AudioTech

Join us for a special live broadcast from the bustling floors of NAB 2024 in Las Vegas! This episode dives deep into the latest trends and technologies shaking up the audio industry. We're bringing you the inside scoop straight from the heart of the action, featuring: Exclusive Interviews: Robert opens the bag in whats in SourceConnect four, which is set to revolutionize how we handle Atmos and multi-channel audio streaming. Product Spotlights: Discover cutting-edge products like the new vocal booths that promise unparalleled sound isolation, even on noisy show floors as their VP of Marketing Freddie Gateley joins us for a chat. Tech Insights: Learn about the tech that's driving audio innovation, including the latest in virtual set technology that could change film and TV production forever. Live Demos: Experience the power of Austrian Audio's OC 707 microphone, designed to deliver exceptional sound clarity, even in challenging environments. Whether you're an audio professional or a tech enthusiast, this episode is packed with insights that you won't want to miss! A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth... https://tribooth.com/ And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear..  https://austrian.audio/ We have launched a Patreon page in the hopes of being able to pay someone to help us get the show to more people and in turn help them with the same info we're sharing with you. If you aren't familiar with Patreon, it's an easy way for those interested in our show to get exclusive content and updates before anyone else, along with a whole bunch of other "perks" just by contributing as little as $1 per month. Find out more here..   https://www.patreon.com/proaudiosuite     George has created a page strictly for Pro Audio Suite listeners, so check it out for the latest discounts and offers for TPAS listeners. https://georgethe.tech/tpas If you haven't filled out our survey on what you'd like to hear on the show, you can do it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZWT5BTD Join our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/proaudiopodcast And the FB Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/357898255543203 For everything else (including joining our mailing list for exclusive previews and other goodies), check out our website https://www.theproaudiosuite.com/ “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.” Hunter S Thompson   loading Summary In this podcast, George and Robert explore the latest audio technology and trends from the NAB show, including the launch of SourceConnect four, which enables end-to-end Atmos audio streaming. They also discuss the impressive soundproofing capabilities of their trade show booth and the advantages of prefabricated booths over custom-built studios with guest Freddie Galey. The hosts delve into the logistics and costs of shipping vocal booths internationally and highlight Vocal Booth's diverse market applications. Additionally, they share their experience using the Austrian Audio OC 707 microphone for recording on the road and discuss the advancements in virtual production technology showcased at the expo. The conversation also touches on the extravagance of Las Vegas and the use of wireless technology to record podcasts in a crowded convention setting. #AudioTech #VocalBooths #NABShow2023 loading loading Timestamps (00:00:00) NAB Highlights with George and Robert (00:00:57) Streaming Atmos Audio with SourceConnect Four (00:04:35) Soundproofing Magic at the Trade Show (00:05:57) The Value of Prefab Booths (00:11:26) Shipping Vocal Booths to Australia (00:15:12) Vocal Booths: From Testing to Pets (00:19:00) Building Recording Booths for Any Space (00:22:12) Recording on the Road with Austrian Audio (00:24:17) Virtual Production Advancements at NAB Show (00:28:53) The Excess of Las Vegas (00:29:55) Wireless Tech Powering Podcasts at Convention (00:32:24) Wrapping Up and Staying Connected Transcript : Y'all ready? Beat history. Get started. : Welcome. : Hi. Hi. Hi. Hello, everyone, to the pro audio suite. : These guys are professional. : They're motivated. : Thanks to Tribooth, the best vocal booth for home or on the rote. Voice recording and austrian audio making passion heard. Introducing Robert Marshall from source elements. And someone audio post Chicago, Darren Robbo Robertson from Voodoo Radio Imaging, Sydney Tech to the Vo stars, George the tech Wittem from LA, and me, Andrew Peters. Voice over talent and home studio line up. : Learner. Here we go. : And welcome to another pro audio suite. Thanks to tributh, it's your freedom. The golden handcuffs. And don't forget the code TripaP 200 to get $200 off yours. And austrian audio making passion heard. Now, lots of things are being heard at NAB as we cross live to George and Robert. : Yeah. We are here at NAB 2024. Hello, everyone. We're in Vegas, baby. : What happens in Vegas instead of. : Well, not today. : Yeah. I hope the sales keep on going outside of Vegas. : That's right. But we don't want the money to stay in Vegas. We want it to go with us. We're all here to make money. That's the bottom line, we have to admit. : It's true. It's very true, actually. We want to show our stuff. That's what we really want to do. And then if it makes money, very. : Gordon Gekko of you, I must say. : Yeah, exactly. Very few people leave Vegas. : I'd be buying everybody and dismantling their companies if I was Gordon Gekko, wouldn't I? : Yeah, something like that. : Yeah. Greedy's good. I'm not in on that name, but I'll google it later. : It's that movie where he's like the Wall street guy, and he just buys other companies and destroys them. And all the union people are like, no. And he's like, fuck you, capitalism. : Yeah. So we're. I'm here because of vocal booth. Vocal booth.com. We've done a little story about them already and what I've done with them. But we're here. I'm here because I wanted to hang out with them and meet all of their customers and help them make. : Then it might be the right decision. : And Robert is, of course, here with source elements, and he's helping to promote the launch of SourceConnect four, which is doing some very impressive stuff. : Yeah, we got nominated for our best in show award. Specifically, we made source connect four. The upper end version is going to be able to stream Atmos end to end. And that actually doesn't sound like that impressive because it's possible to stream multi channel audio right now. But the difference is source connect four will be able to stream all the bed, all those channels, all the objects which could be up to like hundreds and 128. And the metadata for all those objects so that the receiving side can render that locally for their system on the fly. And then you can do that for up to five connections simultaneously. So you could have a director monitoring an Atmos mix and the stage could be on a 25 speaker system. The director could have a twelve speaker system. The producer could log in from another location and just receive on binaural and maybe the writer logs in and they're at home and they only have five. One. And all those things can be rendered locally for each system so the stage doesn't have to dumb down or render down to the common denominator. Yeah, that was great. : Mind bending stuff. : I think we need to add a caveat to that though. You can do all that unless you're on the australian NBN. : Well if you have Andrew's Internet then all you can do is half a channel. : That's right. South of Melbourne. Not so great. Sydney. No problem. : It seems that way, doesn't it? : Yeah. : But seriously though, is that dependent on your connection? : Well yeah, if you're streaming 128 channels of audio we figure on the realistic side you need at least five megs upload. But really each person and it can add up quite a bit. So we're really talking about people with really good pipes. But the intended audio audience for a product like that tends to be mix stage for a feature film. They're sitting on top of a ton of bandwidth. And then on the home side, most people's download, I mean you can get a gig download without even thinking about it. : Yeah. : So yeah, it'll take your average podcasters. : Not going to use it, let's be honest. : Of course. : Or you just need George's cell phone that can get a gig from. : Yeah, we can get on 5g here. I can get 1.2 gigabit download. : Wow, wow, wow. : Inside a building. : I'm moving to the states, so I'm done. : I think the towers are in the building. : Yeah, no, there are definitely microcells inside this building. So it's. Anyway, to try to paint the picture. We are in the middle of the heart of the central hall. It's about as central as this show kind of gets. The main stage is about 150ft in front of us, right down the hall, which has tremendous sound levels. There's music playing. There's presenters. It's all kinds of stuff going on and yet we can get away with recording in this noisy environment until, uh oh. : Bing bong. : Hello, we have a guest. Until that door opens, you can hear the noise. : I think we should do that again. : Yeah, yeah, let's hear that again. : Before and after without all the talking. : Over. Take two. Take two. : Silence. : Open the door. : Wow. : And then close the door. : That's crazy. That's insane. : It is really good at a show floor because I've been to plenty of booth demonstrations at shows and it's really a hard, like, this is, this is as bad as it gets. You know, if you were doing a sports thing and who knows what's going on outside. Maybe not NASCAR racing, maybe not Formula one, but who knows, like a football game, you could probably get away with quite a bit with some stuff like this. Especially if it's, you know, off, you know, place in the right place. : Yeah. : Well, we've got another folk, another folk here. Yeah. Freddie Galey, which we've spoken to before. You betcha. How you doing, Fred? : I'm doing awesome. : He's the reason we're all, at least I'm here. And this is the reason why we have this booth here. : That's why we have the booth. : How many years of nab for you now? : This would be. Oh, when was my first one? In 2012? 2013? : I think so. So that was after we teamed up because guy was the first one that we. : Yeah, we were. I just, you know what? My Calvin, our owner, just sent me a photo like a couple days ago and he happened to be the one that we were down there and I said, source elements here is 2015. : Wow. : Yeah, it's not been a while. : And. : I've been coming to these spottily over the years, but I'm so glad that I came to this one because the, the quality of the, of the people that attend nab are top notch. I mean, these folks are not just creatives, but they're like education directors, station directors, managers, just incredible high level people here and they understand the value of this thing. The first thing I'm always impressed by is when you tell them what this, this is a big booth we're in, what, eight by ten? : Yeah, this one's an eight by ten platinum plus. Or a double wall with an extra layer of mass loaded vinyl. : Yeah. And you know, if we were at a music convention, you might tell them the price and a sticker shock might roll over their face, but not at a show like this, because people understand the value of what this thing does. : What's something like this? Like 15,000? Yeah. : So the basic one of this one would go out as seen here at an eight by ten. And the platinum double wall, including all the shipping be 23,000 shipped. : And the shipping is like two, three. : Grand on the chunk of it. : It's pretty stiff, but we pay for the shipping, so that's your out the door price. : That's what I love. These guys price everything shipped in the US, which really takes away any of the mystification of what stuff credit really. : Costs and, like, parts and materials and someone to build it. You're spending that much money, at least, and then double it for the frustration. : I've done a lot of custom studio designs and builds with contractors, and it's excruciating. : Yeah, excruciating. : Like, I. One of the things I get hard to do so often is, should I build or buy? And the build argument is so strong now more than ever, because construction's so damn expensive. It's very frustrating to deal with contractors. Not that they're bad people. : They don't understand the details of, like, I even did it now, and my contractor, I said, put these little rubber pads underneath the floor, blah, blah, blah. Do not screw the new subfloor to the old floor. What did they do? : Yes. : Thousand screws in it. By the time I got home from work, it's like, it's done now. My floor is coupled, and I didn't want it coupled. : You can spend gobs of money way more than this thing for something this size, and then have one mistake. One screw goes through his timber, short out the build, and it's ruined. : You ruin the whole. : That's a couple. Yeah, yeah. : One of the things, too, that I've had clients and stuff in the past is they've called us. They were already pretty well down the road with somebody, and then they were like, I'm just gonna see about having some. A prefab. And we came in, they're like, oh, you guys are a third the cost, and you can have it here this month. Yeah, game on. Let's go. And then that was the other big thing for them, too, is they were like, hey, I'm not modifying my real estate, so this is not going to be something I have to try and resell. This pool house with a recording studio in. It's like we just take it each. : Part of the art, right? : You have to include that cost, which is once you want to sell it, you've now modified some basement room to something that people don't want, and then you got to put it back, and that'll cost you at least half as much to undo it all. : Yep. I know. Watching Joe Cipriano's custom built studio I designed 15 years ago essentially be dismantled and destroyed because the people that bought the house don't need it was rather heartbreaking. : If there's one way to devalue your property, build a studio. : Unless you're very lucky. : Yeah. Unless you actually find you're just lowering the pool of people that want to buy your house on resale. Seriously. I had a real estate agent, and I was talking about building my studio and this and that, and I was like, definitely do not get rid of that bathroom. But all in all, I was like, you're devaluing your property by building this huge studio in it. It's like, well, I'm not moving in my case, but if you don't know or you're building, you know, buying an investment house and you might be planning on selling it, building a studio in there will cost you at least as much as a prefab booth. It will cost you more to get rid of it, and you will be frustrated by the whole process, and it will take you longer. : It's a serious commitment. Yeah. : What's even wild, too, is that recently, schools have been getting into that, too. I had one school that built an entire second story out of an acoustic floor just to be able to put our booths in on top of that so that they didn't have to later demo all the sheetrock and all the studs and everything. They're like, let's just put 17 big booths up here, make it look like it's all one structure, wood veneered, and wire all the h vac and everything into it. But later, we can just get rid of it. : Do you know one of the best tricks I've seen? You buy a booth, and then you just build the simplest wall in front of the booth, and the whole thing looks like it's built into the house, and it's only been one wall with one stud and one layer of drywall, and it looks like Joe Cipriano's place, practically. : Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. : So, gents, down there in Australia. : Yes. : What do you guys have in mind? What do you want to know? : I actually have a quick question about the booth you're in, because every Aussie and every Englishman is asking, yeah, it's great. 23 grand in the states. But if I want one down here, what's shipping going to cost me, and I'm Bhop. : Funny you brought that up. : 50,000, 100,000 australian. What's the conversion rate is off. : It fluctuates. : We've been seeing NAB is very international. So there are Qatar people from Qatar, Dubai, Europe. And you guys, did you ship something overseas not too long ago? : Well, even just thinking about Australia is just this last year we did University of Sydney down there and we did. I mean, containers full down there and they did a whole room full of booths and stuff. So logistics are the big thing down there. So if it's something going to Sydney or going to a port city, that's not too big of a deal. We have really good air options, we have really good freight options for the ocean options as well. And if we do a full container down there, it's really easy. We can even get that dropped off at the place and then it's almost like having a trailer. : So we're talking group orders. Maybe get together and do a group order or something, then fill a container. : Yeah, exactly. You know, we can always use somebody consolidating stuff over there. : So the shipping, the 23,000 for this booth shipped, that's continuous us states or is that. Yep. : That's going to be anywhere where we don't have to cross borders. Because then once we do get into, like, Canada, of course, we've got all the tariffs and fees and stuff that has to go in there and somebody has to be grabbing it on the other side. It's usually. It's funny how it's really not sometimes that much more. Sometimes it's like an extra $150 on our freight side to get it over there, but on. And that's if they're taking care of all the tariffs and all the import duties. We can do that. We can act as brokers for people too, though, and make it pretty easy. But again, it just depends on the level of. : It's a really world market now. I mean, we are doing build outs in the US where the windows and doors come from, China. This is not unusual. This is all happening right now. So things moving between continents is not nearly. Now, I know there was a little problem besides missiles. Yeah. ICB vocal booth. Intercontinental ballistic vocal booth. : I'm sorry, it just crossed my mind. I don't know what. : Filters. Filters, yeah. So, yeah, no, it's not unheard of. Would you buy maybe a little one off, four by four? I don't know. It depends on. Because you're sharing a container when you're doing like, one booth. Yeah. : And we do international crates, and so we can get it priced out just for a crate. The hard thing is that that is even a fluctuating market. So we've seen, all of a sudden it'd be dirt cheap, like, where we can get something down there for $1,200 shipping, but then we'll see it, like, just absolutely spike. Like, of course, we saw weird things during the whole COVID pandemic, like ships that were just sitting out there with stuff rotting on it. So it was just astronomically up and down, so you never really knew. But we do really quick turnarounds on quotes, so that's something that it's all up front, like, you know, order the boot and then find out how much shipping's gonna be once you guys, when somebody's happy with the way that the quote is, they're ready to go ahead and move to the next level. We're on the phone with our logistics. : Guys and we got it done. : So AP's just texted me, he'll take a container load, please. : Right. : Right away. : When you're all done with the container, you can just line it with double wall and make a booth out of the container. : Maybe we should line it with other things to pay for it. : Yes. : There you go. : Exactly. I think this just became evidence. : Hello, ASIO, if you're listening. Yes. : Yeah. So what's your biggest market? Is it people like myself, like a voice over talent? Or is it more studios, as in, you know, commercial studios? : I'm guessing it's broadcasters and production companies. : Yeah, it's funny. Our biggest market, probably. I mean, if we wanted to talk just dollar wise, it's going to be education and corporate, even testing. So those are the biggest ones that are getting really big boosts. So some of these will be 16 by 32ft and nine or 10ft tall. Some companies, like Medtronics or Philips, respiratronics or something, they'll be doing really big production stuff and want to move all their testing stuff inside because they're in a bigger factory. And so this is something that they can pop up right in a factory, bolt to the floor in there, and have a whole way of stuff coming in and out. : Bolt it to the floor. You're gonna couple it and then you're gonna get all those vibrations through the. : Yeah. : And so again, what they're all about is they don't need an anechoic chamber, but what they need to do is have all that equipment out there and bring it down to a level that's good enough for their testing inside. And so even inside of that big booth will be other booths. : Oh, wow. : Yeah. So it's a big crazy thing. But again, to bring a level down to another level and to another level also, we've been doing a whole lot of stuff with Apple and Amazon and stuff too, and their testing departments. And that's just one of the most consistent things that we have. : And then what stuff do they need? : A big thing that we designed for them is custom testing enclosures. And so this will be stuff to test all of their small. I don't know what my NDA can let me say, but you all know. : What Apple devices, that they all know. : What Apple branded devices about the size of an iPad or the size of generally portable things. Portable. So a lot of stuff in the testing facilities where they'll want to stack up like maybe 15 or 20 of these and have run localizations on all of those and not have them talk to each other. So they don't need like an insane level of isolation, but enough to where they're just not straight talking to each other or maybe even like speaker arrays or weird things on the inside and then even up to that. So, like, booths that are this size that they can go in and then have stuff kind of bounce around even. We do a lot of stuff like in the broadcasting world and stuff like the Nielsen Corporation that the Nielsen ratings and stuff too, where they build living room sets inside of our booth. So they have big 16 by 32 sets. : Wow. : And they're all dressed out and they have robotics arms and stuff, but they can build all those living room sets, put all their listening devices in there and then run all the tests around. And they have, like, I can't remember, they run like 32 of their own little tv stations in the back. And so they can broadcast to their own little closed circuit. Not closed circuit, but just a very small power thing and then test how this works across all of their tv stations and what it sounds like in this living room and what sounds like in that living room and if this thing is working and stuff. So again, that's the crazy thing about vocal booth, is that we never know who's gonna call and stuff. So we do get the people that, you know. Yeah, I'm unfortunate. : I rarely say no. : It sounds like, you know, yeah, we pretty much say no to very little. : Do parents ever call and they just wanna put their kids in the booth, actually. : Okay. So recently I did get a call and somebody wanted one for. They wanted one of our ant boxes that would perfectly fit a dog crate. And so they could put their dog in there because the dog had anxiety issues and he could be put in there. And we have ventilation and everything. And that crate slid right in there. And the dog could sleep in a nice, very quiet environment when they went to work. And then we had later one that somebody bought a three carat diamond for their parrot. So that thing was driving people crazy and the neighbors crazy when they go to work. And so they both. And I don't know. I mean, you don't ask questions. : Polly's got a booth. : We just don't say no. : Back to this. Back to the dog crate one, though. It's school holidays here, so I'll take four of those, please. : Absolutely. : And they stack nicely. : Yeah, yeah. Nice one. : What, the children or the boots? : The serial killer. Did the serial killer want an environment to do his thing in? : A less eating Las Vegas hotel food for too many days in a row. : Haven't had that customer yet. : There was somebody who wanted their entire bedroom put in one. : Oh, wow. : What were they getting up to in there then, I wonder? : I don't think. : I didn't ask, but I don't think it was all about what kind of sound was coming from the inside, but from the outside, so that's okay. They actually, it was one of the writers on Jimmy Fallon's show. And they were like, I get done writing after the last show is done and we get too busy and I might not get home until 08:00 in the morning and done writing, and then I'm in Manhattan and this is a nightmare stuff. So sent a booth, and from our booths, they can all be built from the inside out. They have nice ventilation and everything. So he just built it right into his bedroom and then threw all the bedroom set and everything aside. : That's very interesting. Your boots can be built from the inside out. You can put the floor in a corner and you're not screwed. You can put it in the corner. You don't have to, like, build it in the middle of the room and then shove it in the corner. : That's huge. : I have built enough booths that that's a big deal. Like, I didn't even realize that. That's really. : That's huge. : Yeah, we put all the stuff on the inside because so many places you want to maximize your, you know, your. Maximize your space. And so some people will even call, they just have an alcove like that. That's a big thing with corporations stuff, too. They're like, we've been given the area where the printer used to be. And that's our recording studio now. And so, yeah, no problem. As long as you get there from the front, build all the sides, and even with really short ceilings, we can build it right up to within, like, two inches of the ceiling and then slide light in, you know, the ceiling panels so that you don't have to go up and above and lay them down and then put that final wall in there. And that's a. : That's a really big deal. I mean, building booths is, you know, building your own built in booth is really frustrating, but it's still a task. It was. : It. : I mean, it's gonna, like. I'm sure you guys can put this thing together in, what, like, 2 hours or something, but if your first time on this, you're gonna spend the day building this thing. : Yeah. : At least the day. How good you are with instructions and how far it is you have to bring the panels or whatever. It just depends on the people and. : How it's like going to Ikea. : I was just there yesterday. : Very heavy Ikea, insulated with Romo. : Okay. : So funny enough, Ikea has actually become one of our clients, as last time. And we just sent him one of those little wrenches. : Yeah, yeah, yeah. : We seem to have lost our Allen key. : Yeah, that's right. : Well, you've got a few leftovers, like. : Yeah, yeah. : What do I do with my missed. : Yeah, yeah, totally. : On that wall. : You guys don't mind, I've got. I've got some clients and stuff to see out here, too, but it's great talking to you guys down there. And always a pleasure. So, Freddie, thank you for letting us enjoy. : Cheers. : Love having these guys around, and it's been fun. : Thanks, Freddie. Cheers, man. : Thanks. : Cheers. : Now listen to the door. Here we go. : Let's hear it again. : Seriously, it's good. : That's very good. : It is good. : That mic is doing good, too. From the distance, it's picking him up really clearly. It's hard to tell how it really is when you're the speaker. : Yes. : But when you turn it on him, it's good. : For most of you are probably only hearing the show. This is really an audio show today, and we are using the austrian audio OC 707. I promised I would make this my on the road mic. : It's a tighter polar pattern than the. Than the OC eight, I think. Right? : I think so. Like, I'm. So we're. Right now, Robert and I are equidistantly across from the mic, and it's still getting both of us. But it's a little more diffuse. Right? It's not as focused. : It's got a good presence. Like, that's even more presence. I hear that. And that's just rotating the mic, like, 30 degrees or something. : So very cool. It's definitely not. It's not a wide cardioid. It's a more narrow, maybe almost hyper. : I think it might be hyper. I don't know, but it's. I think it's doing well. : Yeah. Well, it's weird, because in this booth, we have other mics. We have some earthwork ethoses, and we have some other gear. But I opted just to go single mic handheld, which sounds old school and weird, but the nice thing about that is I can essentially engineer this. So I'm controlling and mixing manually. This is an old school thing, but I'm literally mixing the three of us. And because we have one mic, we don't worry about fading and crosstalk. We can get away from the glass. That's. This booth has a lot of glass because it's all about showing off. And, yeah, it's working out really well. : It's funny you should talk about mics, though, because the file I sent to you, that was done in the back of the car with the austrian audio, Cc eight, I sent to one of the engineers at big radio network here. And he said, what mic is it, and where do you record? I told him, CC eight with the mic four pro in the back of my car. And his reply was, nuts. Absolutely nuts. He couldn't believe it. : Right? : Yeah. : So from now on, you're doing all your sessions from your car? : That's right. : Yeah, exactly. : Exactly. : Well, I gotta say. So I don't know how much time you've had to really see the joint. I've only walked one lap of the central hall briefly, because, honestly, I've had so much to do here, I've not had a chance. : I mean, I walked one row down, so just the aisle. We got a pretty good boot spot. So we're on, like, a main aisle, but I just got to go all the way down and back. And I did see one thing that was really impressive. So do you know what a video wall is? : Yeah. : Like an led screen. It bolts together and is modular. : Not quite. More like, okay. You used to shoot stuff on green screen. Why shoot on green screen when we already have the whole background shot? : Oh, yes. : So now they have this thing. It's a $4,000 box, which is like. This is like million dollar shit. And now it's like $4,000 box. You can build the whole environment virtually. Or if you go through a bigger process, you can shoot it all from multiple angles. It'll stitch together. Then you shoot it with an iPhone or some camera that has the same thing that you use for VR. So wherever you move the camera, the video behind you moves in the exact same way. So you get the same angle. And all the parallax. Not only that, the thing controls all the lights that you set up around it. So if you turn it to a place where you say, this is dark, the lights will go down and. : Whoa. : Yeah, well, this is million dollar stuff. Like, I don't know exactly how much the real deal stuff is, but this is like $4,000, I think. : I remember seeing it here the last four, five, six years ago, and it was extremely, like, science fiction and extremely expensive, and it's. Now it's accessible. So what do they call it? Virtual sets, right. : Well, it's more than a virtual set, but yes, it's a virtual set, but now it's. I thought they call it a video wall or something, and it just negates the need for. Because a virtual set, you're sitting there just looking at a green screen. But on this thing, the actors, like, running around doing this thing, and they look behind, and if there's a character, they can make eye contact with the screen. They can act and feel it much more than pretending that they're talking to a green screen and imagining what's there. They can focus their eyes in the right places. : Right? Yeah. : Well, there's a couple of guys I know here who set up a thing called Dreamscreen, which you can google, and that's the same thing. But they've got massive sets with the whole back of the set is giant video wall. And they've shot a lot of films there. In fact, they were up for Metropolis, the remake of Metropolis, the Fritz Lang film. : Yeah, it's. : Oh, wow. : Except bring your own screen. : Yeah. : But they said it will work with projectors, so you can stitch together multiple projectors and fill a, you know, who knows how big of a wall. : Well, they did a. They did a big thing here. One of the first things they did was a series called fires. It was all about the bushfires drama. And they, of course, could actually, you know, have the. Have the fires actually happening with the actors on set, on the screens. So the actor, even though they had, like, the, you know, the car there was on fire or whatever, they had blah, blah, blah. But they had the screens in the background so the actor felt like they were actually in the middle of a bushfire. : Whoa. : Wow. : Yeah. This is the kind of thing you see at nab. It's all the traditional stuff, like mics, camera booms. Um, but you're seeing way more of this virtual type production. There's. There are apparently 150 different classes here on AI stuff alone, because there's a huge amount of education that comes along with it. We're just. We're just here for the expo. You know, we're here to sell. But there's a huge education component. : I mean, that's. That's the problem with being an exhibitor, is that you can't do it. You can't see all this stuff. It's like, it takes an nab. You can probably do in a. It'll take you at least two days or three days to really see everything. : And your feet are gonna kill you. : Yeah. CES is insane. You'll just shoot yourself when you're done. But as an exhibitor, you get to stand on your feet all day. But you only get to see your own stuff because. : Yeah, so. So I haven't seen anything too revolutionary. There's another company here that does soundproof windows, which I've known these guys forever called, literally soundproof windows. And they have an entire Conex shipping style container that they've converted into a quiet space so they can show off all their doors and windows. And it is damn impressive. As quiet as it is in here, takes it down another ten to 15 decibels. : That's. That's like a whole other level. : That's, you know, that's probably a hundred thousand plus install. : Yeah. You're not shipping that to a residential place, and you're not building that on your own in a day. : This thing's on a. This thing's on a flatbed truck. It's trailered in, and they've used it in am show and stuff like that. You know, so it's. I'm staying a whole extra day tomorrow just so I can start seeing things that I haven't been able to see. Yeah. : Because if you lose weight. No, it's impossible to lose weight here. That's my problem, actually. : You know, a six dollar order of onion rings at the Westgate is enough to feed like a starving family. : Yeah. And they don't even talk about the buffets. : I ate a $30 omelet this morning because that's. It was a buffet. And all I wanted was a damn. Yeah, that's Vegas. : Right. : Well, let me tell you. I mean, we just had the Sydney Royal Easter show here, which is like our big carnival of the year, I guess in Sydney, a cup of lemonade was dollar 18. : What? Oh, my gosh. : Yeah. $18 for a cup of lemonade? : Oh, my gosh. : That's ridiculous. : Well, the other thing I want to mention is that, you know, again, we've been talking about source elements and their new product. We're using Nexus right now as our communications portal. So we're all communicating real time over Nexus, and we're using source Connect 3.9 because that's the version we have currently installed. Third four just dropped, but we're using that. And the amazing thing is, we're doing all that on my laptop, which is running on a battery I don't even have plugged in. We're using a mic port pro, which is also running on batteries. And we're using a hotspot on a phone connecting all this via wireless to a mobile, you know, a mobile data connection. And we're doing all which. : That is mind blowing because I've been to so many of these conventions where usually you have to come in with three separate cell phone connections and you do what's called bonding them into one. When you get 100,000 people here with their cell phones, the towers just bog down to a crawl and you have to brute force it with three parallel connections. You're just doing it like a pedestrian turn on my hotspot. : Yeah, yeah. If you're on Verizon here, you're in good shape. If you're on t mobile, you're pretty well screwed, because Verizon, which I should. : Mention the source elements booth, is using a Verizon connection, which they were very gracious to provide us with. And we hooked up and it was a gig. And I was like, gigabit. : Yeah. : Gigabit connections on wireless. : Wow. : So we've been just leveraging all this technology to do shows from here. We've been recording from this booth. I've done. This is my fourth podcast since I've gotten here, and it's just incredible we can pull off these days. And, you know, and by the way. : Everyone, I like to point out that this, in a show floor that's really loud, is much better than most of the audio I give. : Yes, indeed. : This is a true fact. Actually, talking about the amount of bandwidth you've got there. I'm just looking at my hamster, and he's giving me the hairy eyeball saying, give me a break. I'm puffed out. : Yeah. : Yeah. So it's been great, guys. So I'm watching a ton of people outside the booth that are, like, circling. They want to come in and they're. : Going to start huffing and puffing and. : Like, they're being tutting and rolling their eyes. Is that what's going on? : We'll put a. Yeah, no, no, no. There's just people that want to come in, so. : And I need to go huff and huff. : You do HR puff and stuff. : Exactly. : That's right. : All right, we're out. : Yes. : Well, that was fun. Is it over? : The pro audio suite with thanks to tribers and austrian audio recorded using Source Connect, edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Voodoo Radio Imaging with tech support from George the Tech Wittem. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say, g'day. Drop us a note at our website, theproaudiosuite.com.  

Andrew joins us In Studio on bands he's going to see this summer, a huge win last night and getting tough too late.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andrew joins us In Studio on Skinner's 1000th game and pranking Craig Rivet.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This Morning, a man who has seen more Eclipse's than all of us, treasures are waiting for us in the Want Ads, and Andrew Peters is in studio talking to us about the Sabres!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on The Pro Audio Suite, we tackle the intricate world of recording on the go. With the ever-increasing demand for mobility in voiceover work, we dissect the use of shotgun mics in less-than-ideal environments, the golden rule of getting your setup right from the start, and the tempting but perilous path of "fixing it in the mix". Our conversation veers into the high stakes of recording from the road, dubbed the black belt of audio recording, where knowing your tools inside out is paramount. We scrutinize the effects of overusing plugins like Isotope, Waves Clarity, and Acorn's latest offerings, especially the trade-offs between noise reduction and the dreaded d-reverb, and their impact on audio fidelity. Moreover, we explore practical strategies for minimizing room reverb without sacrificing the room's aesthetics, leveraging the latest AI and machine learning technologies for a cleaner sound, and the importance of recording a clean, unprocessed track as a safety net. Join us as we ensure you're equipped to record high-quality audio, no matter where you are. A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth... https://tribooth.com/ And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear.. https://austrian.audio/ We have launched a Patreon page in the hopes of being able to pay someone to help us get the show to more people and in turn help them with the same info we're sharing with you. If you aren't familiar with Patreon, it's an easy way for those interested in our show to get exclusive content and updates before anyone else, along with a whole bunch of other "perks" just by contributing as little as $1 per month. Find out more here..   https://www.patreon.com/proaudiosuite     George has created a page strictly for Pro Audio Suite listeners, so check it out for the latest discounts and offers for TPAS listeners. https://georgethe.tech/tpas If you haven't filled out our survey on what you'd like to hear on the show, you can do it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZWT5BTD Join our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/proaudiopodcast And the FB Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/357898255543203 For everything else (including joining our mailing list for exclusive previews and other goodies), check out our website https://www.theproaudiosuite.com/ “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.” Hunter S Thompson     And don't forget that code trip to 100 for $200 discount on your tribooth and Austrian audio making passion heard. Now, a different kind of microphone is the shotgun, which is kind of handy if you're in a not-so-perfect situation. But a lot of people are recording and doing voiceovers from places that they probably shouldn't. So do you fix it in the mix or do you get your shit together in the beginning? : Got to get your shit together in the beginning. Don't think there's any question, really. : Well, do you want to tell your client that you're not where you should be or do you want to try to hide it? Or do you want to just fess up to it? Because I think that hide it well, then obviously you're going to get really good at whatever it is. Isotope and waves clarity. And there's some new stuff from acorn, I think. Speaker C: Yeah, that's why I call recording from the road like the black belt of audio recording, because you really have to know all the tools and all the techniques to pull it off and have it still sound as close as possible to a studio recording. It's not easy unless you have a lot of experience. : If you work any of those things too hard and you're going to hear it, that's the thing. You can hire the best audio engineer in the world, but if you stand in the middle of a bathroom with an open microphone, there's only so much he can clean up before you start hearing the whole it's lost a bit of fidelity thing. : Well, only the voiceover bodysuit is designed for that. : Yes, well, that's the thing exactly. I mean, think once the passport Vo is out, that's the next project is the pro audio suite. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker C: Every plugin that has to do some kind of an algorithm or a digital filter to the audio to remove something causes an artifact at some point, even. : On a subtle level, it takes a little bit of life and reality away to it, and it approaches more of what is probably eventually going to be known as like an AI sort of sound. Speaker C: It could be. Yeah, I mean, I'm already used to rx ten voice. Denoise. I know what it sounds like. I'm immediately always turning it down. Someone's like, I use this plugin and I'm like, twelve DB of reduction is too much, man. : You can always tell when people choke down on the signal too much. And what happens is they start listening to their own stuff and they don't always reference back to the original to see how much you've improved it, because you can overdo it for sure. : Oh, absolutely. Speaker C: People apply this stuff blindly. They don't really have a critical ear. And of course, it's harder to even have a critical ear when you're traveling again. Henceforth, the black belt reference. It's a lot harder to get that same sound consistently when you're on the move. True. : But the thing that does that's noise reduction. But the thing for me that does more damage is d reverb. D reverb is so destructive. Like, just let's call it a quarter turn for whatever you're on. And I reckon you start hearing it. : And which one is that in particular? Because there's the wavelength, but I don't. : Know of any that will deal with serious room reverb and do it cleanly. Speaker C: No, this is the way all these plugins are, guys. The more in your mind you're thinking, I really need this plugin, the worse it's going to sound. : Yeah, true. And then you run them together, run some noise reduction and dereverb and see what happens. That's just like death. Speaker C: It's awful sandy grain. And you have to run them in the right sequence, too. If you got to run multiple reduction tools, they have to be running the right way, the right sequence. Agreed. It's not up. There's a television personality here in the States named David Pogue, and we set up his home studio with what was the minimal, I think, treatment you could get away with. Right. It's a decent sized home office, high ceiling. I didn't want it to look like a studio know stuff covering everything. So we did what we could to still have it look like a nice space to be in. In the end, it still had some reverb. And so when I showed him how to use clarity VXD reverb, he was thrilled because we had already dealt with 95% of the reverb. Right. It was already really good, but there was still a tail. You still had some room tail that was there. So then when he used the clarity VX to reverb it sounded amazing, and he was thrilled. And he's like, I use it on everything. I use it on everything now that I do. And that's because we did our due diligence to get as rid of as much of it as possible. And that's how all these plugins that modify the original audio using algorithms and AI, that's how they all have to work. Now, the AI stuff is a whole different kind of a ballgame. So the ability to do it with less artifacts is definitely becoming a thing. That's why I think the clarity VXD reverb is so good because it's based on machine learning. But you still can't have a room with a reverb tail of two or 3 seconds and just make it sound like a dead studio. : No, I've heard people try, though. That's the thing. Yeah, I've heard people try not happen. Yeah. Just crazy. : It's funny. Obviously, we all look at social media and you see posts from voice talent in their so called booth, or their part of the room where they record. And that was the thing that I was looking at the other day, and I saw one and thought, God, how the hell does that work? Or are they just getting away with it? I don't know. But then that was why I thought, well, I might as well just set up out here. And I mean, this is not ideal by any means. The only thing I've got really in front of me is a couple of those oralx gobo kind of panels. But I've got a hard desk, I'm on a concrete floor. My actual, all my outboard gear and everything in screens are to my left. And there's no treatment in this room at all. : Yeah, I mean, you're lucky in the beginning, though, that you were in such a quiet location to begin with. I know the rooms because the right. : Mic and the right placement, you can get away with the acoustics, you can do a lot, but noise, you're immediately having to use tools that are going to leave their impression on it. I would say that whoever is doing this, until you are so confident with it, figure out how to also record a clean, unprocessed track while you're doing. : The session, at least. : Yeah, as clean as you possibly can before you start dialing in noise reduction and dereverbs and stuff. Speaker C: Absolutely. Yeah. : Just somehow capture it both processed if you need to deliver it processed, but capture onto your hard drive just your microphone. : Yeah. Speaker C: That's what's so cool about this little tula mic. Remember, I did the appearance a few weeks ago from my folks house. A little cute green. I'm holding it. Now, that thing can record through the Bruce free noise reduction algorithm and dry simultaneously to its internal memory or through the USB. So you get both the dry and the noise reduction version of everything you do. : Wow. Speaker C: Which is awesome. : That's cool. Speaker C: That makes it something I would feel way more comfortable using in the field. Not that it's an amazing mic. I would probably pick a better mic, but still, the idea that was thought of is really brilliant. : I think Michael's going to have that next week with the Portcaster AI. Isn't it going to have the Deverb and the denoise knob? Speaker C: I don't know. Is this a scoop? I hadn't heard about that yet. It needs to go in a little. : Baggie, but yes, it's a scoop. : Wow. Speaker C: Okay. : No, I don't think we're getting the AI chip on our interface, but yeah. Speaker C: No, we're going purest. The passport po is purest. : It is. And so it should be. Yeah. So anyway, what's the wash up on this one? Just make sure that you have the best space possible, which we always say. : And then get as close to perfection as you can. And then use it with some restraint, I guess is the word. : And consider capturing an unprocessed version just in case. : And yes, I know, I know that Us audio engineers get this stuff and slap reverb all over it, but it's different. : That's right. But I've already got reverb on it for you. You don't have to worry about that, bitchambo. Yeah, exactly. And don't use Robert's setup for your voiceovers, whatever you do, for God's sake. : And on that note, thanks for joining us this week. It's been a great show. : Thank you, Mr. Letterman. : Yes, and thank you, road. : It only took us three years to find these glowing buttons. : Well, that was fun. Speaker B: Is it over? Speaker A: The pro audio suite with thanks to tribut and austrian audio recorded using source Connect, edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Voodoo Radio Imaging with tech support from George the tech Wittam. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say, g'day. Drop us a note at our website, theproaudiosuite.com.  

We delve into the legacy of Bob Heil, a titan in the pro audio industry whose influence reverberates through the echoes of rock and roll history. From his early days wielding the organ to revolutionizing live sound with his groundbreaking work alongside legends like The Who and Grateful Dead, Heil's journey is one of innovation, passion, and an indelible mark on music technology. We're treated to an exclusive clip from a memorable interview, uncovering the story behind the iconic talk box and its role in Peter Frampton's electrifying performances. Alongside reflections from our hosts and the fond recollections of interactions with Heil, this episode serves as a tribute to a man whose work amplified the soul of music.  Celebrating the Legacy of Bob Heil: A Look Back at the remarkable career of an audio industry pioneer, from his beginnings as an organ player to his revolutionary contributions to pro audio and live sound. Exclusive Insights: Featuring a clip from a 2017 interview with Bob Heil at the NAMM show, shedding light on his history, innovations, and the creation of the iconic talk box. The Birth of Rock and Roll Sound: How Bob Heil's innovative sound systems changed the game for artists like The Who and Grateful Dead, setting new standards for live music performances. Remembering a Legend: Personal anecdotes and reflections on Bob Heil's impact, his approach to sound engineering, and his legacy within the music and audio production communities. Tribute to a Visionary: Acknowledging Heil's vast contributions, from his early work with organs and sound systems to his influence on modern podcasting and amateur radio.   A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth... https://tribooth.com/ And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear.. https://austrian.audio/ We have launched a Patreon page in the hopes of being able to pay someone to help us get the show to more people and in turn help them with the same info we're sharing with you. If you aren't familiar with Patreon, it's an easy way for those interested in our show to get exclusive content and updates before anyone else, along with a whole bunch of other "perks" just by contributing as little as $1 per month. Find out more here..   https://www.patreon.com/proaudiosuite     George has created a page strictly for Pro Audio Suite listeners, so check it out for the latest discounts and offers for TPAS listeners. https://georgethe.tech/tpas If you haven't filled out our survey on what you'd like to hear on the show, you can do it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZWT5BTD Join our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/proaudiopodcast And the FB Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/357898255543203 For everything else (including joining our mailing list for exclusive previews and other goodies), check out our website https://www.theproaudiosuite.com/ “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.” Hunter S Thompson   Summary In this episode of The Pro Audio Suite, sponsored by Tribooth and Austrian Audio, the team pays homage to the late Bob Heil, a revered figure in the pro audio industry. Hosted by Robert Marshall, Andrew Peters, George "the tech" Wittam, and Darren Robertson, they reflect on Heil's influential career, from his beginnings playing the organ to revolutionizing the sound systems for rock and roll, particularly for the legendary rock opera "Quadrophenia." Heil, also a dedicated ham radio operator and a friend of Joe Walsh, leaves behind a remarkable legacy. His prowess is exemplified by his creation of the PR 40 microphone, considered the gold standard in podcast mics due to its distinctive tone.  The episode concludes with a remembrance of Bob Heil's innovation, good-natured enthusiasm, and his considerable contributions to pro-audio technology.  #RockAndRollLegacy #ProAudioInnovators #PR40MicMagic Timestamps (00:00:00) Introduction - Tribooth Sponsorship (00:04:34) Bob's Ham Radio and Microphone Endeavors (00:10:02) Evolution of Microphone Brightness (00:10:55) Pro Audio Suite Recording Setup Transcript Speaker A: Y'all ready? Be history. Speaker B: Get started. Speaker A: Welcome. Speaker B: Hi. Hi. Hello, everyone to the pro audio suite. Speaker C: These guys are professional. They're motivated. Speaker A: Thanks to Tribooth, the best vocal booth for home or on the road. Voice recordings and austrian audio making passion heard. Introducing Robert Marshall from source elements and someone audio post Chicago, Darren. Robert Robertson from Voodoo Radio Imaging, Sydney, to the Vo stars, George the tech Wittam from LA, and me, Andrew Peters, voiceover talent and home studio guy. Speaker B: Here we go. Speaker A: And don't forget the code. : Trip a P 200. That will get you $200 off your triboof. And austrian audio making passion heard. Unfortunately, someone won't be heard anymore, which is a sad loss to the industry is Bob Heil, who's had an illustrious career kicking off playing the mighty organ and then becoming a pro audio guy. And George, you had the privilege of catching up with him on numerous occasions, I'm gathering. Speaker C: Yeah, I think more than once. There's just one particular interview from the NAm music trade show here in Anaheim from 2017, where I had a good, long interview, I mean, pretty long for a trade show interview. It was like nine minutes. And he really got a lot into his history. And at the time, I think I was remembering. Let's get onto the topic at hand, you know what I mean? He was giving me a lot of his backstory. And now I look back and I'm like, sure. I'm glad I had that chance. And to really hear it straight from him. I'm sure he's told those stories a thousand times. Right. But it was really cool hearing it from him. I mean, he literally created the sound system and envisioned the sound for quadrophenia. : Oh, really? Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker C: In fact, I have a clip here I can play from that interview where he talks about the birth of what he called the birth of rock and roll sound. I think that's what he called it. Here, take a listen. : Just go into the Internet, put in the night. Rock and roll sound was born. It's a true story. It really was the first night. And it was with the Grateful Dead. It's quite a story. They wrote the song trucking about it because they're selling all the gear. Yeah, well, their soundman got confiscated the night before because he wasn't supposed to be out of the state of California. We won't get into that. You can go figure it all out. But they come to St. Louis with no pa, ironically. To where? The Fox theater. Speaker C: The perfect place. : Well, there again, the stage manager calls you. You still have all those speakers? And I said, yeah, talk to this guy, handed the telephone to Garcia. And then we hit the front page of billboard because we went on tour with them out of there. And at that time, nobody had ever played through anything like that. I didn't know that. I'm like, this is pretty good, right? Because I had a longevity board that I had gotten and recording board. I had Macintosh amps. It was a big hi fi. That's what I looked and listened. It was beautiful. It wasn't just a loud pa. It was a beautiful sounding pa. That's new. Speaker C: That was new then. : Well, because of the pipe work. And I learned to listen. I had to voice and tune that as at the age of 15, we started in harmonically. Nobody realizes about the harmonics that are so important. I learned that as a young kid, and it's carried through everything I do. But then I was on the road. We hit the front page of billboard and everybody was calling us. One of them was the who. We ended up with them for six years. And from there it was humble pie. Jay Giles, on and on and on. But then they took Frampton out. He was a star of humble pie. They took him out as a solo act. And his little gal penny was married in my home when they were 18. She called me shortly after. She said, I need a Christmas present for Peter. And I sent her a talk box. You can write the rest of Peter Frampton's history, and it's well defined. You go to our website. : Wow. Yeah, I remember the talk box. Frampton comes alive. And that came out. It was like such a feature, and it was so weird. Like, you'd never heard anything like it before. What a story, though. Speaker C: Yeah. I'd love to get into his brain as to how he actually even came up with that idea. I'm thinking he was hanging a lot with the Grateful Dead when he came. : Up with that idea. I think I know what you're getting at. Speaker C: There was some serious psychotropic stuff activity going on there. But, yeah, I mean, the fact that he started. I didn't get that part of the interview, but he started as an organist, so that's a very high level of musicianship required to play an organ. And then he would set up the organs. He would tune the organs. : He was aware of the organs sound. And those organs have just to know how the PA sounds, because the organ's a big sound. You're aware of loud instruments. Speaker C: Yeah, with a lot of sources. Every pipe, every thousands of pipes. So, yeah, what an incredible background he had. And the. Then, you know, he's out there selling mics at know, which is. That's one of the neatest reasons to get to go to a nam show, is you did get to know a, you know, and you got to talk to him and interact with, you know, Wes Dooley from AEA microphones. Grew up repairing RCA microphones. : He's a trip. Wes Dooley is great. Speaker C: Totally. : Just another booth at Nam. Speaker C: Actually, a living historian. Right. And you get to talk to these folks face to face. It's amazing. But, yeah. I met Bob's daughter, who still works for Heil and still goes out to trade shows and does the beat, and she was very nice, and there's just a heck of a legacy there. So he will be missed for sure. And he was a huge ham radio operator. Amateur radio, as they call, playing organ. : Over the ham radio station like he has his own station. That was just like organ playing, I think, or something. Speaker C: Yeah, it was over. : He was also friends because he's actually from. Well, he died in Illinois. Speaker C: Yeah, he's from St. Louis. : Right. But he was friends with Thomas Holman. Speaker C: Wait a minute. : Thomas Holman started, did the THX protocol. Speaker C: Oh, he's the th and thx, yeah. Oh, wow. : And Thomas Holman ended up, I believe, over with connections to Skywalker Sound and another audio luminary or whatever. Speaker C: So cool. And then Bob also picked up, they picked up Bob to be a host on a podcast called this week in Tech Twit TV, which was the show that influenced me to start my own show 1512 years ago. And he did his own show over there about ham radio. And they did it for quite a long time, actually, until they had to end the show. But they still have his rig that he had built for that show. It's still at the Twitch studios in one corner of the know, a memory of really cool. Speaker B: Really, really cool. : The quirkiest thing, I thought, with Bob was his friendship with Joe Walsh, who was also a ham radio. : Didn't Joe Walsh also use the talk box a bit? Speaker B: Did he? Speaker C: He did. He said later in that interview that Joe Walsh really kind of had it mastered. He really clearly, in hearing his interviews and reading his interviews, how he had an extremely. He was extremely tight with Joe. They were best buddies, and they spent a lot of time talking ham amateur radio together. : Did they go driving in Joe's maserati? Speaker C: Probably. And it was actually Joe who was experimenting with using the mics that Bob had made for doing amateur radio because. : For doing studio work. Speaker C: Yeah. Bob hated the crappy mics. That amateur radio operators were stuck using. So he made a better mic. And then Joe was like, yo, plug this thing into your studio console. And Bob's like, I never would have thought of that. He's like, I'm telling you, it sounds better than an SM 57 or a 58. And he's like, yeah, you're right, it does. And a brand of microphones was born from there. His most well known podcast mic, the one that's kind of the gold standard, is called the PR 40. And it has a distinct tone to it. It has a distinct voice. : Is it kind of big sounding? Speaker C: It's big, and it has a lot of cut, like mid range. : It's like a combo of like an SM seven and a 416 or something. Speaker C: Kind of almost. It doesn't have the top end of a 416, but it definitely has more of a cut. So if you ever listen to Leo Laporte on this week in tech, or any of the shows that Leo does, you'll hear the distinct sound of that mic. It's not a flat or a hi fi mic, it's a broadcast mic. : But it's a dynamic sounding mic. Speaker C: Yes, it's a dynamic mic, and its voicing is designed for being heard. Let's just put it that way. : Yes. Speaker C: The PR 30 and the PR 20, to me, sound a little bit smoother. I like the voicing of them better, personally. But the bottom line is Bob tuned his mics by ear. And he said that specifically later in the interview. I wasn't curious about response curves and all this stuff. I would just go by what I thought sounded right. So those mics are tuned by Bob's ear. And the guy had a good ear, but probably by the time he got into his fifty s, sixty s, seventy s, didn't hear everything. : Did all the mics as he made them throughout the years just get brighter and brighter? Speaker B: It's a good question. Speaker C: It's a good question. I mean, I'm sure he wasn't the only one that put his ears on the mics after quite a while. Joking, but yeah, no, it's true. The sound systems I listened to growing up that were often not eqed well, unfortunately, were often helmed by a gentleman of an older generation. Yeah, I was like, no, too much two k and 4k. My ears are bleeding. : You're accelerating their progression towards mixing. Speaker B: Like you. Speaker C: Anyway, rest in peace, Bob, thank you for all your innovation and your good natured enthusiasm. Enthusiasm towards audio, and we really appreciate it. : Absolutely. Speaker B: Yeah. Well, that was fun. Is it over? Speaker A: The pro audio suite with thanks to tribut and austrian audio recorded using source Connect, edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Voodoo Radio imaging with tech support from George the tech Wittam. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say good day, drop us a note at our website, theproaudiosuite.com. #BobHeilLegacy #ProAudioSuite #AudioInnovation #RockAndRollSound #TalkBoxMagic #AustrianAudio #TriBooth #ProAudioLegends #SoundEngineering #MusicHistory

You can now watch episodes of Tales with TR on YouTube! Head over to https://www.youtube.com/@THPN to watch the latest episode.Welcome to Tales with TR: A Hockey Podcast presented by The Hockey Podcast Network.Join former Montreal Canadiens' first-round draft pick & Shoresy star Terry Ryan, as he talks about the sport of Hockey, brings on various guests, and shares tales of his life and professional hockey career.Host: Terry Ryan @terryryan20 Network: @hockeypodnetEditor: Carter Potts @Carter_Potts_97Sponsored by: Draft Kings - Use promo code THPN at sign-up for exclusive offers. https://tinyurl.com/DRAFTKINGSPROMOTHPN

You can now watch episodes of Tales with TR on YouTube! Head over to https://www.youtube.com/@THPN to watch the latest episode. Welcome to Tales with TR: A Hockey Podcast presented by The Hockey Podcast Network. Join former Montreal Canadiens' first-round draft pick & Shoresy star Terry Ryan, as he talks about the sport of Hockey, brings on various guests, and shares tales of his life and professional hockey career. Host: Terry Ryan @terryryan20  Network: @hockeypodnet Editor: Carter Potts @Carter_Potts_97 Sponsored by: Draft Kings - Use promo code THPN at sign-up for exclusive offers. https://tinyurl.com/DRAFTKINGSPROMOTHPN Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Summary: This week on The Pro Audio Suite, we dive deep into the heart of Podfest with George 'The Tech' Whittam's firsthand account of 'suitcasing' and the power of networking without a booth. Discover the fascinating world of podcasting - from grassroots communities to the cutting edge of AI and chatbot technologies. Learn how every conversation could turn into a collaboration, and how the future of content creation might just be a chatbot away. Hosts: Robert Marshall, Source Elements & Audio Post Chicago Darren 'Robbo' Robertson, Voodoo Radio Imaging, Sydney George 'The Tech' Whittam, LA's go-to audio engineer Andrew Peters, Voiceover Talent & Home Studio Expert Special Thanks to Our Sponsors: Tribooth - the ultimate vocal booth for recordings at home or on the road Austrian Audio - crafting passion into every audio experience Featured Topics: Networking Without a Booth: George's adventures at Podfest, including the art of 'suitcasing' and leveraging community awards and events for networking. Podfest Insights: An overview of the Podfest community, ranging from solopreneurs to niche content creators, and the invaluable role of networking apps like Hoova in fostering connections. AI and Podcasting: A deep dive into the use of AI and chatbots in content creation, including practical tips for leveraging these technologies to streamline content creation and even author a book. The Future of Content and AI: Exploring the intersection of AI, content creation, and the ethical considerations of content ownership and creation. Listener Engagement: Inviting listeners to join the conversation on our Facebook group, suggest topics, or simply say hello. Episode Conclusion: Wrapping up with a look forward to the evolving role of AI in the audio and podcasting industry, and a reminder to subscribe and engage with The Pro Audio Suite community. #ProAudioSuiteTips #SuitcasingStrategy #PodcastCommunityInsights A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth... https://tribooth.com/ And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear.. https://austrian.audio/ We have launched a Patreon page in the hopes of being able to pay someone to help us get the show to more people and in turn help them with the same info we're sharing with you. If you aren't familiar with Patreon, it's an easy way for those interested in our show to get exclusive content and updates before anyone else, along with a whole bunch of other "perks" just by contributing as little as $1 per month. Find out more here..   https://www.patreon.com/proaudiosuite     George has created a page strictly for Pro Audio Suite listeners, so check it out for the latest discounts and offers for TPAS listeners. https://georgethe.tech/tpas If you haven't filled out our survey on what you'd like to hear on the show, you can do it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZWT5BTD Join our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/proaudiopodcast And the FB Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/357898255543203 For everything else (including joining our mailing list for exclusive previews and other goodies), check out our website https://www.theproaudiosuite.com/ “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.” Hunter S Thompson   Timestamps (00:00:00) Introduction (00:00:43) Recap of Podfest Attendance (00:05:51) Networking at Podcast Conferences (00:09:20) Corporate Presence at Podcast Movement vs. Podfest (00:15:19) Legal Challenges with Chatbots Transcript Speaker A: Y'all ready? Be history. Speaker B: Get started. Speaker C: Welcome. Speaker B: Hi. Hi. Hello, everyone to the pro audio suite. : These guys are professional. They're motivated. Speaker C: Thanks to Tribooth, the best vocal booth for home or on the road. Voice recording and austrian audio making passion heard. Introducing Robert Marshall from source elements and someone audio post Chicago, Darren. Robert Robertson from Voodoo Radio Imaging, Sydney. To the Vo stars, George the tech Wittam from LA and me, Andrew Peters. Voiceover talent and home studio guy. Speaker B: Learn up, learner. Here we go. : And don't forget the code. Trip a P. That will get you $200 off your triboof. Now, George, you've been whizzing around the country like crazy. You went to Podfest. What were you actually doing at Podfest? : I was suitcasing. That's what we call it in the. Speaker A: Business, dealing people's suitcase. : Suitcasing. : Suitcasing is when you show up in an event that you didn't sponsor and you start schmoozing and handing out cards and selling your wares. Speaker B: Yeah. : You don't have a booth, basically. : You don't have a booth. Yes. Thanks to Jody Krangle. Thanks, Jody. Jody's was a sponsor this year. She actually got an award. She got a community award from the Podfest event, which was really cool. They also had an award show there. Every community needs an award. So they have their own awards event there. They call them life, I guess they call them like lifetime achievement award type awards. And Dr. Drew was there giving out the awards. He's a famous. He's a tv personality. He's been on numerous shows over the years. : He's kind of shilling stuff a little bit, isn't he? He's even like diet fed stuff. : So here's the deal. The podcasting community is an interesting one, right? So it's a mixture of a lot of solopreneurs. Right. Which is why I'm there. I'm a solopreneur. Then you've got a lot of people that have something to say that would not fly on traditional media. Right? Yeah. So extremists own whatever thing it is because it's your podcast. You can say whatever the heck you want. So you have a lot of people. I could saw a lot of people that were wearing don't tread on me shirts. : Yeah. Like survival. Buy all this food and stockpile it. And here's how to live in a hole for 80 days during the apocalypse. : So there was a represented. Some people on that community were represented. Then you had a lot of people that are women. Every interest group you can imagine there's somebody at the podcast Podfest because they want to. Either they have a podcast, they want to start, they want to learn about it, or they have one and they want to promote it, or they just want to get better at what they do and more efficient. So that's why they come. And I was spending my time bouncing between the expo hall and some of the different talks that were there, and there were many panels. So what's cool about this conference, which I think sets it apart from every other conference I've ever been to, is they use an app called Hoova, spelled like hoova Hova. And the Hoova app is a community app that lets you know exactly who's at the event, you know exactly who they are. You have their contact info, you can exchange info. It's kind of like the Namshow app on the phone. Did you use the Namshow app? Speaker B: Yeah. : I was going to say, this sounds just like the Namshow app, which was kind of annoying. : Yeah. Just not as crappy. Although the Namshow app got better, but it was terrible for a long time. But so now you have a way to contact every single person at the event. And so I'm looking at the app right now, and it says the total number of attendees was 1869. : Wow, that's pretty good. : That's not bad. : That's good. : Yeah. So definitely bigger than Vo Atlanta. They would like to be that big, I'm sure. In fact, J. Michael Collins from Vo Atlanta was there actually at Podfest with a booth. : But what kind of price? I mean, what kind of price? Vo Atlanta is really expensive to attend. So when you're talking about 700 people being at that show, you're still talking about a lot of coin. Was this one, like $100 a ticket, or was this $700 a ticket? : They do the thing, which a lot of conferences do, which is having a lot of different tiers. So you can start at, like, 200, and you can go up to $1,000. So the $1,000 ticket is a vip, and that's actually the ticket that I had, because Jody, as a sponsor, actually got a companion ticket, and she offered it to me, which was extremely kind. So I went as a vip, which was cool, because I could go to every single happy hour and all the special things where they give out, they have or d'oeuvres, and you can schmooze and stuff. And that was really valuable, because while I was in line for one of these, waiting in line for a drink, I met a voice actor. Sorry. I met a podcaster who runs a show about the chemical industry. And here I'm thinking, okay, that could be the end of the conversation. : Yes. : But I didn't let the conversation end. And instead I kind of dug in and said, and I came at it from an absolutely entrepreneurial mindset of like, okay, everybody has a need. Every industry has a need. Is there a need in that space that I can fill? Right. So by the time we got to the front of the line to get our drinks, I had already figured out a niche that I wanted to fill. She said, I'd like to have you on my show. I'd like to share this with my community. Let's work on maybe a package for the people that listen to my show. It was like all this came out of just standing in line. : Let me make sure I understand this. She's got a show about chemical engineering. : Chemical industry. Like, she does a show where the audience are people working in the chemical industry. : And you are co marketing with her. : Now, if she replies to my email, yes. Okay. So this is the thing. I also realize you go to these shows, these people come. It is an absolute, like schmoozegasm, right? You're meeting hundreds of people, making tons of connections, talking about amazing ideas. And then after that event, it is up to you. You really have to follow up. So one guy, he has a calendly link on his website. So he's like, hey, let's chat. So I immediately made a point with him. And I'll be talking with him as soon as he gets over. : Yes. : Yeah. Because that's the other thing that these conferences are for. I mean, that's certainly what I got from freaking Nam. : Yeah, I got my Covid by hanging out in Venice Beach a little more. Got it over. Got over a couple of weeks ago. So as soon as he's off of his thing, I'm going to be talking about his studio that we are going to build in Dallas. So that turned into another gig, hopefully. He seemed very keen. So for me, on a, b to b level business to business, I had made some really great contacts. And then on a b to c level business to what consumer? I handed out my card to a lot of people. And it was really nice because the vendors that I did know there, which was BSW and sentrance and yellow tech, all know me, or you have great relationships. And they were all willing to keep my cards at their table and I would just circulate the room and every time I stood near the table, someone would walk up and say, what is all this would. And they would often mention me and say, george is the guy that can help you. So it was extremely valuable for me to be there to network and connect with folks. And whether it turns into a true ROI, who knows? You just never know until the deposit comes. But I did make some really good, valuable connections there. I also hopefully endeared them to the point where they will involve me in the production of the show next year so that they will not have super loud PA systems blaring in a very large echoey room, to the point where you can't hear the person presenting or you can't talk to your vendor that you're trying to talk to because the sound system is blasting. : It's funny because podcasting is all about audio, but at the same time it kind of has this such a broad demographic because everyone is really like, I just want to have the podcast done. I'm not really about the process of podcasting. I just want it to be good. : Oh, yeah. And there's a lot of networks and producers at these events that want you to sign on with them that will get you ad dollars and do all the marketing for you. And there was quite a few of those companies there, too. But for me it was just learning about the community, who's doing it, who's producing it, how do they do it, what are the issues that they're having in producing it? And what was cool with the Hoover app is I was able to immediately, when there was an issue with the sound and it was too loud, I was able to immediately post something in there and get the attention of one of the organizers who within probably 2030 minutes was asking me, where are you? Let's talk. That's pretty awesome. I really love that. When I was at podcast movement, that was not happening. That was not going to get through to somebody. : How big is podcast movement compared to this one? : Physically? It's a bigger space. It was a larger space, more vendors, but I'd think in the actual turnout it probably wasn't all that bigger. But podcast movement attracts more corporate entities. So you had I heart podcasts from iHeart media and iHeartRadio. You had Amazon. You had all these very big brands know there to represent their podcast interests and hopefully find their new big hit show. So that was a very different thing. They were not doing that at Podfest. : So with these big companies that you're talking about, but they were looking for podcasts to put on their platforms. Is that correct? : At podcast movement? Yeah, they're there to schmooze with their big sellers, their big shows. They had what you would expect. They had beautiful sets with couches, and they spent some big time money, big. : Dime to be there. : And Podfest wasn't like that at all. Podfest felt a lot more like a voiceover convention with a smaller expo hall. And as Jodie told me before, it's much more grassroots and more friendly. : They both have like an educational thing. : Tons and tons of education. Like the one gentleman I'm going to work with named Larry Roberts. He had a 30 minutes thing on how to write your next book using Chat GPT, and it was an absolute paint by numbers. This is exactly how I did mine. Just do it like this and you can have a 200 page bound book in about a week, right? I mean, literally. Speaker B: Wow. : So I'm like, dude, I want that PDF. And he said, here, scan this QR code, download the pDf, right? So I'm going to use that because I have been gathering my own knowledge with my own custom language model to create my own chat bot. So now I actually have all the content that I would need to make a book. And that's the thing that's kept me from wanting to do a book, because the research and the time to compose a book is eternity in the pre Chat GPT AI era. But now I can very quickly outline a book and write the chapters with the help of a Chat GPT. And the beauty of it is it's my own knowledge I'm not scraping from anybody else. So that was a really cool revelation. So there was a lot to learn there. : I wonder if we could sort of ingest our podcasts that we've been doing for the last five years, of course, and then write a book from that. : Absolutely. : Interesting. : Yeah, I mean, it is frighteningly simple to do it. I mean, it is crazy easy. I could do it in two days. It just really is bizarrely simple. But you want it to be good, so there's going to be more time involved. You want to read the entire book, right? You want to make sure everything that's being written isn't garbage and you have to make sure it's factual, so there's time involved, but still, yeah, it wouldn't be that hard because we have, what, six or seven years worth of content on YouTube. Yeah, all that content is easily scrapable. You create a sitemap from all that content and you load the sitemap into a chat bot utility and you're done. I mean, that's how easy it is to build a chatbot from any content. : But where are you getting your initial chat bot from? Like, where's the infant AI Robert that I can go put on the server and start freaking feeding it? : Like Fargois, oh, what's the service I'm using for that? Wouldn't you like to know? Speaker A: We would like to know because we'd like to write a book, but yeah. : I'll do a book. : But for my, I think if I. : Was going to do a book, it'd be a coloring in. Speaker A: Yes, exactly. Dot to dot. : For my custom chat TPT, I'm using a thing called custom GPT. That's actually what I'm using as a service to build my chat bot. And it's extremely user friendly and they have all the right tools. You have to be a little bit savvy, but you don't have to be knowledgeable about code. You don't have to be knowledgeable about a lot of things because they have a lot of good content on there and how to do it. You have to learn how to write a Persona. Your Persona is literally, how is your chat bot going to talk to people? Is it going to be mean and abusive? You can make it do that if you want. You can have it be abusive and angry. You can have it be overly effusive. You can have it be friendly. You can have it be way too verbose. You can tell it exactly how you want it to behave. So I've been working on my Persona to make sure my chat bot is friendly but still gives very direct information and at the end always plugs my business. That's how it works. : You should give it a brief, like most of the voiceover briefs that we get, nonsensical sort of garbage that is impossible to understand. Speaker A: Voice tone should be a little more purple than blue. : Yeah, it'd be interesting just to make this thing follow you around. Like if you just videotaped every day and this thing ingested one day behind what you were, and then it just, whatever, this conversation here, all of it. : It'S just like, oh, yeah, no. By the way, there is a little device that you can slap onto your iPhone and it just lives on the back of the phone like a little barnacle. And it does that. It records every single phone conversation and then does a Chat GPT transcription of it. Speaker A: For what purpose, George? : It's the ultimate note taking device. I mean, literally every phone call you make is recorded and converted into notes and, you know, it has a mic, so it'll record what's in the room, but it'll also record what's coming out of the. Like. We're all going to have a Persona copy of ourselves. And when we die, that's going to live on in some form or another. Speaker A: Google. : That's going to be normal. Speaker A: That's what that is. That's already exists. You see the crap that it gets thrown at me, that tana and I have talked about in the kitchen? Speaker C: Oh, yeah. Speaker A: Listening. It's just crazy. : Absolutely. : Yeah. : I'll tell you the story. This is a really wacko story. This goes back to the 80s. Mick Fleetwood was in Australia, and he came in to do an interview, and he was sitting there with a little cassette recorder, recording everything. And after we'd done the interview, I said, were you just getting a copy of the interview? He said, no, I record everything. Every conversation he has. Speaker A: Everything. : So he was an archivist or a librarian type person? Speaker B: Yeah. : No, but when he gets home, he said, when I get home, I'd like to sit in the house and listen back to all the cassettes. Speaker A: He's got time for that. : And I'm like, fleetwood, I suppose, but I think there were a few things they did in the 70s. It's obviously come back to haunt him, I reckon. Speaker A: I reckon. : Absolutely. : Either that he was just very proud of himself and just really wanted to hear what he had to say. : It was so bizarre. : Yeah. In the same way, I'll watch our show occasionally or listen to the show. It's just a different experience to hear back what you were saying on the show, and I might pick up something you said that I didn't notice. You might edit and listen, and it's a different format than the way we did it, but at this point, I'm looking at, and I know we've gone off topic from Podfest to AI again, because this is the way the show goes, but it's like, I want to make sure I have my ip in my chat bot before somebody else does. I can't stop somebody from taking all my YouTube videos and putting it in their chat bot, but at least I can have mine and have it in my. Speaker B: I think you should be able to. : Stop somebody from taking all your YouTube videos and putting it in their chat. : Well, I could go into YouTube tomorrow and just say, these are all unlisted and they're gone. : No, I know that. But even though you have your stuff up there on a platform where it's basically monetized, and that's one thing that you should be allowed to do, having someone ingest it. It's like, still your ownership. They can ingest it, but they can't turn around a commercial chat bot. Speaker A: Well, I can. : Well, yeah, this is why New York Times is suing chat GBT, right? That's literally how the year started out. That news story came out and I was, hmm, I can't afford to sue anybody. That's never going to happen. But the least I could do is at least have my chat bot and at least put it out there before somebody else does and market it. I figured that's the best that I can do. I can't stop anybody from stealing my content. There's unscrupulous people in the voiceover world who would do that for sure. People that are just trying to make a buck and have content on their website. And people do it all the time anyway, just not to the scale of a chat bot. But that's going to be the thing of 2024 is making. : So what there's going to be, at some point, there's going to be lawyers or just like, for instance, we had a film, a commercial, and the producer was telling us that Ford sued the company. And it was like, why? Well, it turns out it wasn't really Ford. So essentially what they got sued for is the commercial had a cop in it and the cop was sitting in it. Crown Victoria. Because that's like your cliche cop car, right? So next thing you know, Ford gets a letter from some lawyer that just says, I can get you $200,000 signed here, Ford Ce, not CEO, some lower, who knows who signs it. Next thing you know, the lawyer now has Ford behind him and he goes and sues the director or the production company of the car for not getting a license to use their likeness of a car because it's so associated with police, and they extract $200,000 out of them. Speaker B: Wow. : So same thing. Some lawyer, some company is going to be there and they're just going to go through and be like, oh, crap. I can tell where this chat Bot has been trained, going to reach out to all the people that trained it. : We're also going to be replacing the lawyers with AI with a chat bot. : Yeah, it'll be a chat bot. That's exactly right. There's going to be a chat bot that's going to go see where other chat bots were trained, and then when it catches them, it's going to go send a letter of cease and desist, and you're going to be like, untrain your chat bot, which I don't even know if you can do. : Oh yeah, yes you can. I can go into mine at any time and just say, take that out of the database and it's gone. I can put an entire YouTube channel in my thing and go, I've done it. I put a whole YouTube channel in my chat bot. I didn't like some of the answers it was giving and I just took it back out. : Okay, so, so basically you'll get a cease and desist letter like that. Like remove this content from your chat bot. : That's probably what's going to happen. So you listen to the show and we will dribble on into AI land. : With no matter what the topic is. : That'S where we're all going. : Yes, it is true. : The next stop is the outro. Speaker B: Well, that was fun. Is it over? Speaker C: The pro audio suite with thanks to Triboof and austrian audio recorded using SourceConnect, edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Voodoo Radio Imaging with tech support from George the tech Wittam. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say g'day. Drop us a note at our website. : The pro audio suite.com. Close.  

This week, Robbo, Robert, George, and AP dive headfirst into the digital abyss of archiving audio sessions. It's a showdown of practices, preferences, and pure paranoia that none of us want to miss. We're slicing through the magnetic tape of mystery to answer the burning question: To archive or not to archive? That is the question. Especially for voice actors like AP - is digital hoarding a necessary evil, or just a fast track to a cluttered hard drive? We're peeling back the layers on why every beep, click, and voiceover session might just be worth its weight in digital gold. Robbo, with his trusty naming convention stolen from his days at Foxtel, shares his vault-like approach to keeping every sonic snippet since Voodoo Sound's inception. That's right, folks - for a mere $25, Robbo will keep your audio safe from the digital gremlins, guaranteeing that not even a rogue magnet could erase your audio masterpiece. Then there's Robert, with his tech fortress of JBODs and RAID arrays, ensuring not even a single byte goes awry. It's like Fort Knox for soundwaves over there, proving once and for all that redundancy isn't just a good idea; it's the law in the land of post-production. But wait, there's a twist! Robbo shares a cautionary tale that's straight out of an audio engineer's nightmare - precious recordings lost to the abyss of DAT tape oblivion. A horror story to chill the bones of any audio professional, reminding us all of the fragility of our digital (and not-so-digital) creations. As for AP? He's the wild card, questioning the very fabric of our digital hoarding habits. But when push comes to shove, even AP can't deny the siren call of a well-placed backup, especially when clients come knocking for that one session from yesteryear. We also get a deep dive into the eccentricities of backup strategies, from George's cloud-based safety nets to the analog nostalgia of reel-to-reel tapes. It's a journey through time, technology, and the occasional Rod Stewart office painting gig - because, why not? So, gear up for an episode that's part backup seminar, part group therapy for data hoarders. We're dissecting the digital, analog, and everything in between to keep your audio safe, sound, and ready to resurface at a moment's notice. Don't miss this electrifying episode of The Pro Audio Suite, where the backups are plentiful, and the stories are even better. Who's backing up this podcast, you ask? Well, let's just hope someone hit record. A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth... https://tribooth.com/ And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear.. https://austrian.audio/ We have launched a Patreon page in the hopes of being able to pay someone to help us get the show to more people and in turn help them with the same info we're sharing with you. If you aren't familiar with Patreon, it's an easy way for those interested in our show to get exclusive content and updates before anyone else, along with a whole bunch of other "perks" just by contributing as little as $1 per month. Find out more here..   https://www.patreon.com/proaudiosuite     George has created a page strictly for Pro Audio Suite listeners, so check it out for the latest discounts and offers for TPAS listeners. https://georgethe.tech/tpas If you haven't filled out our survey on what you'd like to hear on the show, you can do it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZWT5BTD Join our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/proaudiopodcast And the FB Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/357898255543203 For everything else (including joining our mailing list for exclusive previews and other goodies), check out our website https://www.theproaudiosuite.com/ “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.” Hunter S Thompson Summary In the latest episode of the pro audio suite, we dive into the world of audio archiving and discuss the various approaches and philosophies toward preserving our work. We're joined by industry professionals including Robert Marshall from source elements and Darren 'Robbo' Robertson from Voodoo Radio Imaging, as well as George 'the tech' Wittam and Andrew Peters, who share their personal strategies and experiences with archiving voiceover projects. The conversation opens with a discussion about the importance of having a naming convention for files, with insights on the methods adopted from professional entities like Foxtel. Listeners will learn the value of archiving everything, as shared by Robbo, including the practice of charging a backup fee to clients to cover the costs of maintaining archives. George introduces his once-a-year protocol of transferring data to an archive hard drive, emphasizing how affordable data storage has become. However, he also highlights the importance of staying current with technology to avoid the obsolescence of media, sharing anecdotes about DA 88 tapes and the need to keep track of archival materials. The episode touches on practical voiceover tips, like not necessitating a workstation at home and utilizing a laptop as a backup plan for voiceover recording. We also cover the worst-case scenarios such as dealing with corrupted audio and the advantages of modern backup solutions. The discussion moves on to cloud storage, specifically iCloud, and its benefits for voice actors who might otherwise become digital hoarders. The team debates the challenges of booting up from an external drive on modern Mac systems like the M1 or M2, offering insights into the workaround solutions which may require additional purchases. Listeners are reminded of the great offers from our sponsors, such as Tribooth for the perfect home or on-the-go vocal booth and Austrian Audio's commitment to making passion heard. The episode comes to a close emphasizing the professional edge of the podcast, all thanks to the contributions of Triboof and Austrian Audio, and the craftsmanship deployed using Source Connect, with post-production by Andrew Peters and mixing by Voodoo Radio Imaging. The audience is invited to subscribe to the show and participate in the conversation via the podcast's Facebook group. #VoiceOverTechTips #TriBoothTales #ArchivingAudioArt Timestamps (00:00:00) Introduction: Tributh Vocal Booth (00:00:42) Archiving Discussion with Robbo (00:07:34) Talent Experiences with Archiving (00:13:17) Digital Media Frailties (00:18:48) Tape Transfers Before Auctions (00:21:27) Backup Plans in Voiceover Work (00:27:39) Importance of Redundancy (00:31:04) Apple Silicon Booting Limitations (00:35:25) Podcast Credits & Reminder to Subscribe Transcript Speaker A: Y'all ready? Be history. Speaker B: Get started. Speaker C: Welcome. Speaker B: Hi. Hi. Hello, everyone to the pro audio suite. These guys are professional. They're motivated. Speaker C: Thanks to tributh, the best vocal booth for home or on the road. Voice recording and austrian audio making passion heard. Introducing Robert Marshall from source elements and someone audio post Chicago, Darren. Robert Robertson from Voodoo Radio Imaging, Sydney. To the Vo stars, George the tech Wittam from LA, and me, Andrew Peters, voiceover talent and home studio guy. Speaker B: Learn up, learner. Here we go. : And don't forget the code. Trip a p 200 and that will get you $200 off your tribooth. Now, Robbo and I were having a bit of a chat the other day about archiving, which is something I strangely do, and I don't know why I do it, but I do. But there are different reasons for archiving, and mine is obviously completely different to Robert's. And of course, it's completely different from Robo's. So how much do you archive and how far back do your archives go? Speaker A: Well, as I said in the conversation yesterday, I actually archive everything. I could pretty much pull out any session I've done since voodoo sound existed, which is fast approaching 20 years. But I do charge a backup fee to my clients, so they pay $25 for the privilege. And, look, to be fair, whether they pay it or not, I do archive it, but it's a built in cost covering for me to be able to go and buy a couple of hard drives every year. But I reckon if you're going to do it, the most important thing for me anyway, is having some sort of naming convention. So I actually pinched mine off Foxtel when I used to freelance there. The channels had a three letter prefix. So I give all my clients or podcasts a three letter prefix, and then I use an underscore, and then it'll be what the thing is, whether it's a program or imaging component or whatever, and then the name of it, and then the month, and then an underscore, and the date the day of that month, and then an underscore in the year, and then usually. Sometimes after that, if it's a revision, I'll do underscore r two, r three, r four. And then each year is on its own hard drive or hard drives. So if I need to go back and find something, I've just got an external hard drive player, shall we call it? I can't think of what you call them, but you just plug your hard drive in and it turns up on your Mac, and I can just go through and find what I need. But, yeah, I've got clients that are sort of expecting me to do that. As you and I were talking about yesterday, I don't know whether maybe voiceover artists are expected to or not, but as I said, I kind of thought it would be nice to be able to. : I do it only on occasions if there's any chance that they're going to come back and want to do a revision or they're going to lose something, particularly if it's a massive session or something, that I've actually done the edit myself. I'll keep it, because you can bet your life that they're the ones who are going to come back and say, have you still got that thing? Because we've lost it. Speaker A: Yes. : It's like, no, I haven't, actually. So I keep all those things, but I was keeping day to day stuff and it was like, what's the point? It's like that stuff's already been on the air and it's off the air, it's gone. So why am I storing that for other people? But, yeah. Interesting. What about you, Robert? : I have a couple perspectives on this, I guess, from just sort of a mix operation point of view. What we have is what you call, it's a JBOD, just a bunch of drives is what it stands for. And it's controlled with the raid controller. So there's eight drives in this one, and it's not that big, actually. It's only, what is it? Like maybe two terabytes or something? And across all eight drives are all of our jobs that are sort of current, essentially. And the way the JBOD works is that it's an array. And so you can literally lose any one of those eight drives can just completely go to crap and we won't lose any data. You just slide a drive back in there and it heals. Speaker B: A raid five or a raid six. : Raid six, actually. Speaker B: Right. : So you can lose two out of the eight, I believe, is what we are. And we've had it over the last ten years. When we bought it, we just bought a whole stack of the same hard drives. And we've only had to use like two in the last ten years. So that's like kind of our live job. And then what we do, we would have all of our live jobs on that drive. And then if we ran out of space, we would peel out whatever, we would just go for the jobs that aren't active. So some of these jobs that we have were on that drive and have never been. They just keep on coming back, essentially. So they're always on the active drive. Meanwhile, the people that come in and do one thing and then they're gone, you never see them again. They get moved off, and then we would make two copies of that. And what we've been doing now is like, I'll go home with one and Sean will go home with the other. But however it goes, they're just basically on dead drives, or they're not spinning anymore, they're just sitting on a shelf so we can access those and then what we have. So last for a backup of the main drive. Ray, if the building was to burn down, I was using time machine and then taking a drive home every now and then. But we started using backblaze, which is just a really good service. It's like cheap for the year, and it just backs up. As long as the drive is spinning, they don't charge you. I think by the size, it just has to be an active drive. So that's our off site backup. And then we just have a database, which is really just a spreadsheet where a job comes in. We have like a naming convention, and we name it by the job name and then a job number, and there's a database that has basically every time that job was ever touched. So to us, these are all like a bunch of little rolling snowballs that get bigger and bigger and bigger and jobs come back and they get added to, or they just never go away. And they're always on the active drive. And that's how we do the post operation, the music operation. When I'mixing a band, I just have like a hard drive that sticks around with me for a while and then eventually it gets put on a shelf. And I have a lot of these drives that are sort of just dated. And I've used source zip a lot back in the day when I was low on hard drive space. But the problem is some of these drives are 40 pin ide drives, and I keep around a one firewire case that has a 40 pin. Like I can plug in any one of these hard drives. And then others are SATA. And those are really easy with the USB slots or the USB docking for the SATA drives, but it's looser. I just basically go by date and the client will say, hey, I did something with you, and I'll just go rummaging through my hard drives and hopefully find one from that date. Every now and then you may do two hard drives in a year, but those are my two systems. One is very stringent and good. And the other one is loose. : So George, do you know any other talent who know archive their sessions? Speaker B: I think the vast majority barely are functional on a computer that I work with. So they have extremely minimal protocol. : I know a lot of talent that don't even make a backup to be honest. Speaker B: Yeah. As far as they're concerned, once they got paid they could care less, it's gone. Some people are more data processing type people like me and they like to keep everything they've recorded. So what I would tell people, which almost never comes up, but my protocol is I have an archive hard drive that I will dump things onto about once a year. So I'm basically clearing space off of my local drive, cloud drives. I use Dropbox, Google Drive and iCloud. So stuff's in different places for different reasons. My business is on Google Drive, right. So every single client folder is on Google Drive at all times. And there's something around a terabyte or so there. And that's not that much because I'm not doing multi track productions or in most cases any video. Right. It's just small numbers of files. But my client media folder is on disk anyway because it's bigger than what's on my disk. But what's on disk is about 250gb and there's roughly 32,000 items in that folder. : Wow. Speaker B: And then it's funny, I just have 26 folders, ABCD and so forth. And the biggest folder is the letter C. So statistically there are more people by the name of C and I go by first names, right? So first names with c are the most common. Then s, then j, then a, then D, then m. It's kind of funny, I have all these weird statistics about names because I have 4000 clients. So it's really interesting to see some of the names that are so common. : I've got stuff. This is how stupid it is. I think I'm actually an order. I've got files here. Like I keep a folder for each client and then every session gets put into the folder, right? I look at some of them and even looking at the folder go, God, I haven't worked with those guys for years. And then you open the folder and look at the date of the sessions. It's like that was like 15 years ago. What the hell am I keeping that for? Speaker B: It's amazing, right? Well, data is cheap. It's really cheap to store data. I mean it's never been cheaper, so it's kind of like there's no harm in doing it you just have to eventually clear house. You're eventually going to fill your cloud drive or your local drive. So you have to have some kind of protocol to then move things. : You eventually have to take it into your own domain and not have it up on the cloud. Speaker B: Right. : And there's an old thing with data, though, which is you don't have a copy unless you have two copies. Speaker B: Right. True. This is what I think is interesting. So all these cloud storage scenarios have not changed price or capacity in many years. They're all still $10 for a terabyte or two terabytes. And that hasn't changed in a long time. : The meaning of a terabyte hasn't changed. Speaker B: Right. So what they're doing is they're making progressively more money per terabyte over the years. Yes, because their cost of storage is dropping, dropping, dropping year after year, and they're just keeping the price the same. : But they are continuously having to reinvest. Because another thing about archive and storage is that any. And this is the problem I have. It's like an archive is not a static thing. It must be moved and massaged, and you have to keep it moving with the technology going forward. Because if not, you end up with things like, I've got archives. I mean, I've got analog reel to reel tapes, plenty of those with stuff on them. And I can dig up the deck to play it back. But once you don't have that deck anymore, you just don't have it. And I've got dat backups and exabyte backups. Remember those, robo? Speaker A: Yeah, I do. : And CD Roms. And then. How about this one? That happened to me. I did a whole huge. One of the biggest albums I ever did, and I backed it up to a stack of dvds, dvdrs, dvdrs, like four gigs each. Four gigs each, I think. Were they four gigs each? Is that how much they were? I think so, yeah, four. Speaker A: And then dual layer were eight or something, weren't they? : Eight, right. Okay. And these were some crappy ones. Within three years, I went to play those things. And basically. Data rot. Yeah, it's gone. That's when you learn the lesson. And so if you don't keep your data moving, you don't know what's going to happen to that physical device that's holding it. And not just what happens to it, but what happens to the ability to even use that type of device or that type of software that reads it. Speaker A: Here's the interesting thing, right? I dragged out an old laptop case that I used to store all my dats in when I used to sort of freelance. And I always had dats, especially for radio imaging of bits and pieces that I would drag around with me. And I had to pull it out the other day. And this thing's been sitting in my garage, right? So not temperature controlled, not dust controlled, nothing else. There's about 60 dats in this thing. And I've got an old. It's not even on a digital database. It's an old sort of folder that's got like each dat has its own master and all that sort of shit. So I pulled this out, right? This is stuff that I recorded when I was still at AA in Adelaide. So we're talking 1996, right? I dragged this dad out and my trusty portable Sony Walkman, the TCD D 100, dragged that out, put some batteries in, plugged it into my Mac, chucked the dad in, going, there's no way this is going to work. Hit, dialed up the track number, play, bang, spun up to it, played it back. Pristine. Absolutely pristine. Speaker B: No glitches, no static. : I've had the same thing happen where the DaP machine has been completely screwed. And then you have to get a new DAP machine, but at least you can get those. But when the dat tapes go, you're kind of sol. Exactly your sol. Maybe you can find a read pass that works, but for the most part, that part of the tape is just like screwed. But that kind of thing happens even with files. I had a road. No, not a road. A zoom road. You'd be happy to know it's a zoom. And it was like a zoom recorder. Recorded the files, full concert, got home to play it. Files, complete silence. And it turns out that basically the zoom didn't like the little SD card. It was too slow, it was too this. And every indication was everything was fine until that file got big enough for the SD card to freak out. So all these mediums, even the new ones, still have their frailties. And I know dats are really known for being frail. Like, look at it wrong and it's never going to play back. Speaker B: Well, they're really pro media, right? The pro devices that use media like solid state media usually have redundant disks. They all have two slots, whether it's SD or CF or some other high speed. They'll always have a double slot because they have redundancy that's totally pro level. That's for doing like. : Because if you don't have two copies, you don't have one. Speaker B: Yeah, that's like when you're doing mission critical. You cannot afford to lose what you're doing. My daughter's a work at. : Exactly. : Yes, indeed. Speaker B: The oldest media I have still in a crate in my parents basement are DA 88 tapes, which were high eight digital tapes, and I don't have a machine anymore. I really don't recall telling my dad it's okay to sell my remaining Tascam Da 88, but apparently he did happen. : So I was just at La studios, and they still have their PCM 800 in the rack, which is a Sony version of a D 88. I still have eight at's around. And then. Speaker B: Yeah, I have no idea if those D 88. Some of them will work somewhat don't. I don't have a machine. I don't have any ide drives anymore. Everything's SATA. But one day I pulled up this Corboro box with like, 15 SATA drives, and I realized I could just go to Costco and buy $100 hard drive and literally put that entire box into one hard drive. And I could probably do that. In fact, I think three or four years ago, somebody said, hey, do you have this thing? And I went, I think I do. And I pulled out the archive drive and it wouldn't mount. I was like, okay, this is going to happen. Speaker A: But here's the other thing, right? And this is the thing that annoys me, and I've made this mistake, is you've got to keep a track of this stuff because you're always trying to sort of downsize your archives, I guess. And this is the classic mistake that I made. For years, I carried around these 15 inch reels of analog tape, right? Stereotape. My first demo of commercials and stuff was on this stuff. And when I finally landed this place called take two, which was my last sort of full time post production gig, they still had a quarter inch machine. And we're talking 2001, 2002. And I thought, right, this is probably the last time I'm going to see one of these. So I transferred it all carefully, professionally onto dats and all that. I had about three dats of stuff. And about two years later, I went looking for them. Do you reckon I've ever seen them again? I've lost them somewhere. But whereas a 25 inch reel. Sorry, a 15 inch reel, that's pretty hard to lose, you know what I mean? So it's like, you got to be careful. : Yeah, well, it's funny, when I was a kid, this is slightly off topic, but I suppose archiving in a strange way. But during summer holidays, a mate of mine, we used to go and try and get jobs. And his brother was a painter and decorator and he used to get us out, know, doing a bit of labouring for him. And he said, oh, do you guys want to earn some money? It's like, yeah. Yeah. So we jumped in his transit van and we took off down to London and ended up working in a recording studio. And we were painting Rod Stewart's office. : What, pink. : And he had above this. I can tell you exactly what color it was. Mission Brown and burnt orange. : I knew there'd be something like pink or orange. Yeah, there you go. Speaker B: Brown and orange headphones right here. : Yes, that's right. Yeah, it was pretty funny. But the recording studio downstairs, they just used to bin all this quarter inch tape, just throw it away. So it was bins full of. My dad was in electronics, so I thought I might just help myself to some of those. I mean, they're throwing them away after all. And it was just seven inch reels. So I just grabbed a whole bunch of seven inch reels out of the bin, took them home and didn't play them for some peculiar reason. We just recorded over the top of them. Speaker A: Right. : God knows what was on those tapes. Speaker B: Can you imagine? : So check it out. One of the studios that I freelance at one of the gigs they had was transferring before auctioning off these tapes that this janitor got out of a recording studio in New York. It was CBS or something. Turns out it's like the masters or some early tapes from Dylan's first. Speaker A: Wow. : So they auctioned them and then in order to prove, like, they had to have one playback, I don't know, they ended up supervising the transfer. But literally, it's, know, these tapes, they were supposed to go through the bulk erase, but not all of them would make it to the bulk erase. And this guy apparently was kind of into folk music and just happened to pull these out. And they just passed around for years and years until finally some grandparent or somebody is like, we're going to auction these. Speaker A: Do you reckon they stuck them in the microwave before they played them back? : Well, it's not the microwave. You put them in the dryer, in the dehydrator. Speaker A: I've heard stories and stories. It was always the microwave for me. We always used to nuke them. And you'd get one playback, but. Yeah, I haven't heard of the dryer. : But that's getting that tape. Because you ever seen one that does it, that you don't do that to? Yeah, well, it peels like it peels. It's the scariest thing. It goes through that pinch roller. One piece of tape comes into the pinch roller and two pieces of tape come out. One is the original tape. The other one's the oxide that briefly looks like a piece of tape until it crumbles into dust. Speaker A: Yeah. And the other is the back. : And you're just like, because it's playing. And you're like, okay, I should just let it play because this is the. Speaker A: Last playback should have been rolling on this ever. Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it? But going back to the Rod Stewart thing, was it Steve Balby on this show that was talking about. Steve was the bass player for noiseworks and his next band was what was greedy people, electric hippies. And they needed multi track to record their album. So they snuck into the archives and stole a couple of the noise works ones. : Yeah, they stole some multi track tape from somewhere. Speaker A: Yeah, it was noiseworks. They went and stole. : Over some band's archive. Speaker A: Well, his first bands. Yeah, the previous band, they stole their previous band's multi tracks and used those to record on. : Okay. At least it was theirs. : Bad archiving there. Speaker A: I know. I guess the other thing that this whole subject leads to, and I guess, George, this is more up your alley, is the thing that always terrifies me is if I've got a remote session, I'll set it up the night before and I'll test everything and I'll save it and make sure that I don't really shut anything down. I'll just leave it all working. But the thing that terrifies me as I'm walking back into the room, know what's gone wrong overnight when the computer's gone to sleep? Has something ticked over or something gone wrong? And I'm going to open up the computer and I'm just going to get into this panic that something's not working. Is there anybody out there in voiceover land, George, who has a plan b? Or who's ever thought about having a plan b? Like, okay, so if my main computer, for some reason just cocks it and I can't get a sound out of it, what am I going to, pushing a broom? Yeah, what am I going to do? Speaker B: I mean, the plan b is most people have a desktop and a laptop, so the laptop is the plan b. That's pretty much it. Home studio voice actors systems are pretty, let's face it, low end. I mean, you don't need a workstation, a $5,006 workstation to do voiceover at home. So you really just need another computer. And for most people, that's going to be the laptop. : It's the travel rig. Isn't the travel rig the backup rig, too? Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I've had clients run and grab their travel rig when something completely goes haywire with their Apollo or whatever, and they're panicking, and I'm like, just pull out your MacBook, plug in your Micboard Pro, plug in your 416, and get the job done and move on. And the client will be happy because you're in your studio, which sounds amazing, so don't worry. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: So that's the backup plan for any really true busy professional voice actor. : When I used to really panic about capturing audio that it wouldn't go wrong, I would actually have two microphones. I worked at two microphones, one going to the main computer and one going to the laptop, and I'd have them both recorded. Speaker B: Yeah, that's like BBC, remember? Wasn't like the 70s where they would literally duct tape. A second mic was for the television show and one was for the film. : You would see that many microphones. Exactly. Speaker B: That's true, because they didn't have distro boxes and splitters and stuff back in those days, I guess. But, yeah, we've never gone to that extent. In the beginning of my career, I did have clients running pro tools that had a DAT backup. That was definitely protocol. Pro Tools was so glitchy. : Yeah. You would run a dat backup with a dat tape. In fact, the way we ran the DAT backup was that you would record the talent in stereo, and then you'd put the clients on the left side so that you had both sides of the conversation. But the talent was always at least isolated on one channel. If you ever needed just the talent. Speaker A: There you go. Speaker B: Yeah, I retired. Dat backups were my clients 15 years ago. But Howard Parker had one. He had a Dat recorder, and he would just hit record every time he'd walk into the booth on the dat and rewind it, because we just didn't know if he'd walk out in a half hour later. And pro Tools had a 61, whatever the hell it is. Buffer. Speaker A: One of those fun errors that pop up that you got to go google what it means. Yeah. Speaker B: As a voice actor who's solo working at home in their closet or their booth. And at those times, we didn't necessarily have a second monitor, keyboard, and mouse in the booth. So you don't want to lose a session. You don't lose in a half an hour, an hour or 2 hours narration. That's the worst. The worst ever is when there's a nonsensical glitch during a two hour session and you don't know what's happening. You have no idea. And meanwhile, the audio is basically garbage. It's like static. : That's why sometimes in a session it is a good idea when you're like, okay, this is good. Stop and record a new file. Because computers like, if something's going to happen, it's more likely to happen to a big file. Back in the day, it wasn't uncommon for a file that was really big to be more likely to get corrupted, essentially. Speaker B: Well, I have set up a modern equivalent to the DAT backup which is getting like $100 task cam, flash recorder, real basic one. And then plugging an output from their interface or their mixer into that and then saying, listen, you're doing a phone patch. It's a two hour narration. You do not want to lose that work. Just hit record on that thing over there. Now you have a backup. You'll almost never, ever need it. But the one time that you need. : That freaking backup, if you don't make the backup, you'll need it. If you do make the backup, you won't need. Speaker B: It's like if you don't bring an umbrella. : Exactly. Speaker B: It's going to rain. : Exactly. Speaker B: That is an absolutely dirt cheap and extremely simple. You can even have a scarlet two I two. And as long as you're not using monitor speakers plugged into it, you can just use the outputs, put it in direct monitor mode and it'll just send whatever you're saying straight out the back line into your Tascam. Like I'm saying, $100 recorder. The basics, the really basic one. And record. : Yeah, it might be through like a little 8th inch connection. It might be mono, it might be analog. But you know what? It's going to be something compared to nothing. It'll probably be. No one will even know that it wasn't necessarily a digital copy. Speaker B: Yeah, it can be a 16 bit 44 or 48 wave. It's fine. I've set this up for a lot of people and when I go to their studios or I talk to them, they almost always say I haven't used it in a long time because they're so used to it being reliable until. Speaker A: It doesn't work, until the day it falls over. Yeah, exactly. Speaker B: And that's why I have clients that hire me and I work with them on a membership and like a contract and I check their systems out on a regular basis. Like, I do maintenance. I check. How much drive space do you have? Are you backing up? Is the backup working? Oh, crap. The time machine backup hasn't worked for six months. And you had no idea you filled. : Your time machine drive. Exactly. Speaker B: Or you filled your time machine, or whatever it is. It can sometimes just corrupt, get corrupt. What's my time machine right now say? It says cleaning up. I don't know how long it's been saying cleaning up. Maybe for a month. I have no idea. I just clicked on. It says cleaning up. So redundancy is really important for those big jobs that, where you're the engineer. : Essentially, the thing that starts to separate really pro operation from. It's like if you're there with a backup when someone needs it, and they're like, I didn't even expect you to have it, but you have it, you're delivering, and I think there's. Speaker B: Yeah, of course. I'm keeping everything I ever do. It's all in the cloud. At any moment, someone will email me and say, my computer crashed, I lost my stacks. I also can't find the email you sent me with the stacks or the email you sent me with the stacks. The links don't work anymore because it was another cloud based system that I don't use anymore. Right. I'm like, no problem. Within, like, ten, I can literally be on my phone, go to Google Drive, put in their name. We would just right click on that thing, and we would get the share link email to the client. I'm like, here's your folder. Here's literally everything I've ever done for you. And they're always grateful, and I never charge for it because I feel like we charge a pretty penny for what we do, and it's just one of those things that's so incredibly simple. It's not like I'm trying to keep online. I'm not trying to keep an online storage of, like, two terabytes for a client. These are not big folders. A big client folder is 2gb. Speaker A: You got to be careful what you keep, though, too, don't you? Because you can become a bit of a hoarder very quickly. You really can. Speaker B: Data hoarding, what's the problem? It's digital. Data hoarding is like, I could care less. Again, I'm not dealing in video, and I'm not dealing in big projects. So I can keep thousands of folders, which I do, and I don't care. It's no skin off my back. Speaker A: See, I used to back up all my video, too. All the videos that came in for tv commercials and stuff and the revisions. And I used to keep every video back, all that up. After a while, I just went, man, this is crazy. So I keep it for, like, it ends up two years now because I basically have two hard drives that I rotate. So when one's full, I'll take it out, stick it aside, get the other one, put it in and erase it and go again. So, I mean, I figure two years is enough. Speaker B: I feel like for any voice actor, it's an absolute no brainer to use some kind of cloud storage iCloud or Google Drive. ICloud is essentially automatic. The second you put anything into your desktop or your documents folder on any modern Mac, it is in the cloud. It just is. And so it's kind of a dirty trick to get you to upgrade your cloud, because it will fill up very quickly. But if you're not the kind of person that wants to think about another service and pay for another service and shop for one, and then think of a way to just use the dang icloud. It's built in, it's automatic, it's cheap, $10 a month for two terabytes. It'll take you a long time to fill that thing up. Just to me, it's a no brainer. And if you're on windows, there's an equivalent in the Windows side. I just don't know what it is. One drive, I think. Speaker A: Yeah, I heard you mention time machine before. Can I give a shameless plug to someone who's not a sponsor of the show, but something I've used for years and I love is carbon copy cloner, which is. : Yes, I love carbon. I use the Jesus out of that. Speaker B: I used to use it. I don't use it anymore. Speaker A: Such a good piece of software. Speaker B: Yeah, no, the beauty of that was you could have a secondary disk that was plugged into the computer that was literally an absolute copy duplicate of your computer. So you could literally have the system drive crap out, hold down, and you. : Can use that as your targeted backup. I used to point my hard drive at home to the hard drive at work so that it could get onto the back blaze at work. Speaker B: Oh, wow. Speaker A: Yeah, wow. There you go. Speaker B: That's a hack. Well, yeah, I mean, just to have. That was a nice thing. Now, here's the thing. Here's a little gotcha for all us Apple people. If you're on an m one or any of the silicon macs, they can no longer boot with a dead system drive. So if your system drive in any silicon Mac is toast. You cannot boot to an external USB drive. Speaker A: Oh really? Speaker B: There you go. Speaker A: I've got one running. I've got a backup running, so that's no good to me. Speaker B: If the internal drive system is blown away, it's unaware of any external drive. Speaker A: Why did they do that? Speaker B: I don't know. Ask Tim Apple. : It's Macintosh. That's why they did that. Speaker B: Yeah, Apple. Apple. : Because it's the slow progression of your computer into an. Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, right. Speaker B: Yeah. : That's annoying. I mean, I live and die on option. Booting the computer and having like some. Speaker B: I'll check. I will re verify that. But when the silicon Macs first came out, this was a bonus contention. People were talking. So here's just what the first search result on Google says. If you're using a Mac computer with Apple silicon, your Mac has one or more USB or Thunderbolt ports that have a type c connector. While you're installing macOS on your storage disk, it matters which of these ports you use. Okay, well, that's totally irrelevant. It has nothing to do with the answer I'm looking for. How do you start up your m one or m two from an external drive? There's another thing. It's not easy as it used to be and likely requires that you purchase. : I mean, you used to be able to boot up a Mac from the network. Speaker B: Yeah, I'm reading this article from Mac World. I'm just skimming through it. Awesome. I don't want to say something that's untrue, but this is what I recall day one when it came out. This is what somebody said. Speaker A: That's really annoying. Speaker B: So yes, you have to have a certain type of drive. Actually, this article mentions Bombich's carbon copy cloner. Speaker A: So we'll boot from that. : No, it just mentions carbon to copy your drive probably. Speaker B: Yeah, they're explaining the entire process. But that external drive has to be formatted in the correct way. Let's say you buy just a random hard drive, like a western digital, and you plug it in and then make that your clone. It will not work. : You have to be. You always had to make it like guide partition. I think it was something like that. It changed over the years. It used to be even like hfs plus. And then it's. Speaker B: Yeah, now it's apfs. : Yes, the container. Speaker B: Yeah, it's apfs. So I know we're going down a rabbit hole here, but yeah, this is the kind of thing you have to think about if you're really wanting to have redundancy and have a system that can essentially crash and be online within a minute. And for most voice actors, that's going to be just too frustrating and difficult to maintain. And for them just to have another computer that can plug in and go is really the most practical thing to do. : That is kind of like the ultimate backup. Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to get rid of my Mbox pro and my 2012 Mac Pro, but I think I might hang on to both of those and they might just be my backup. Speaker B: Well, if it's easy for you to plug those in and get back, right back to work, then it's worth keeping. Speaker A: I reckon that's the thing. I might just sit them in the garage, put them away in a box and seal it up and I can just grab them when I need them. Speaker B: Yeah, sounds good. : Sounds good to me. Speaker B: Sounds good to me. Speaker A: Well, who's backing up this podcast then? Speaker B: Oh shoot. Speaker A: Did you hit record? Speaker B: Well, that was fun. Is it over? Speaker C: The pro audio suite with thanks to Triboof and austrian audio recorded using source Connect edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Voodoo Radio Imaging with tech support from George the tech Wittam. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say good day, drop us a note at our website, theproaudiosuite.com. #AudioArchiving #ProAudioSuite #SoundEngineering #BackupStrategies #DigitalHoarding #AudioProduction #VoiceOverTips #RecordingStudioLife #TechTalks #AudioPreservation  

AI is reshaping industries, but how is it affecting audio outside of Voice Replication? This week, we're diving deep into this "can of worms" on the latest episode of the Pro Audio Suite podcast! Join us as we host a riveting discussion with MPA from WAVES as we unpack: AI's role in enhancing creativity rather than replacing it.  WAVES AI investment strategies. • The potential risks of letting AI scrape and replicate without human creativity. The balance between traditional mixing and AI's edges in audio engineering. Perspectives on the rise of AI voices in media.   We're not looking for a future where AI spits out a Taylor Swift song on command. Instead, we're all about how AI can serve as the ultimate assistant in the studio, ensuring creativity and passion remain at the heart of production. Don't miss this nuanced conversation on the future of AI in pro audio.

This week, we delve into Part Two of our discussion with Michael Goodman of Centrance. We get into the nitty-gritty of the intricacies of creating the PASpport Vo, and the benefits of maintaining simplicity in design by restricting the device to just six knobs, which enhances ease of use for podcasters and voiceovers alike. #VoiceOverTechTalk #ProAudioSuite #DesignSimplicityInAudio A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth... https://tribooth.com/ And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear.. https://austrian.audio/ We have launched a Patreon page in the hopes of being able to pay someone to help us get the show to more people and in turn help them with the same info we're sharing with you. If you aren't familiar with Patreon, it's an easy way for those interested in our show to get exclusive content and updates before anyone else, along with a whole bunch of other "perks" just by contributing as little as $1 per month. 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Goodman highlights the benefits of maintaining simplicity in design by restricting the device to just six knobs, which enhances ease of use for voiceover artists. The conversation also explores the challenges and considerations in pricing and product functionality, like the decision to enable the Passport Vo to work with external preamps. Goodman provides a candid look at the rapidly evolving landscape of audio interface protocols, such as the impending obsolescence of the lightning jack in favor of USB-C and the limitations of ASIO on Windows. Listeners will gain unique insights into the manufacturing process, from the adoption of a platform strategy to the precision of creating 3D printed parts. Goodman discusses the shift to new USB chips due to discontinued ones and reveals how smaller manufacturers are playing a key role. For those interested in the technical aspects of audio equipment production and design choices that impact both the user experience and future compatibility, this episode offers a wealth of knowledge. Tune in to learn from Goodman's expertise and stay informed on the latest in pro audio equipment design. #VoiceOverTechTalk #ProAudioSuite #DesignSimplicityInAudio Timestamps (00:00:00) Introduction with George Wittam and Robert Marshall (00:00:32) George Discusses Design Limitations (00:05:22) Unique Tools for Voiceover Artists (00:08:44) Flexibility of the English Channel Passport (00:11:56) Apple's Lightning Jack Obsolescence (00:16:23) Challenges with Apple's Developer System (00:21:36) Michael on the Passport VO Analog Mixer (00:25:04) Progress on USB Chip Prototyping (00:28:48) DIY Circuit Board Manufacturing (00:33:15) Handling Tiny Components on Circuit Boards (00:35:48) Michael Inquires About Custom Faceplates (00:38:27) Closing Remarks and Acknowledgments Transcript Speaker A: Y'all ready? Speaker B: Be history. Speaker A: Get started. Speaker C: Welcome. : Hi. Hi. Speaker A: Hello, everyone to the pro audio suite. These guys are professional. Speaker C: They're motivated with tech. To the Vo stars, George Wittam, founder of source elements Robert Marshall, international audio engineer Darren Robbo Robertson, and global voice Andrew Peters. Thanks to Triboo, austrian audio making passion heard source elements George the tech Wittam and Robbo and AP's international demo. To find out more about us, check ThePro audiosuite.com. And this is part two of our talk with Michael Goodman. In this episode, we pick up where we left off and we talk about the passport Vo. Speaker A: I like the fact that there's a restriction to the design. Like, Michael had to decide what those six knobs could do or not do. And so it wasn't like, oh, let's just add more knobs. Let's just make it bigger. : I did add more knobs in the black cab. It's got nine. Speaker A: Just kind of pushing squeeze nine in there. Yeah, but no, that's the beauty of when we made the passport. We did not add more knobs. We forced ourselves to work within that restricted design space and say, we have six knobs. We need to do everything we need with these six knobs. If there's more than six knobs, how do you expect an actor to understand what the heck the thing is doing as you add more and more? Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I agree. : See, we should have looked at the black cab when we were asking for stuff. Speaker C: Yeah. Speaker B: I have a funny feeling Michael's answer would have been the same. : I think it's an excellent way of building simplicity into it, and really also, it makes you go through the design process. And I think it was a fun thing with the passport was exactly that. Because at first it was like, so many things. Add another knob, add another knob, and then you have to go through that slightly painful but sharpening process of going, like, we can't only have six knobs. How are you really going to do this? : It's interesting. When I was younger, I geeked out a lot on the japanese culture specifically. I loved their propensity for making small pieces of art. Right. The whole idea with the ice sculpture, art should be ephemeral. It should be there, and it's not there anymore. Right. And then the whole idea with writing a poem on a grain of rice, et cetera. I love compact things. And when we started making hi fi products, we also make some headphone listening products at sentrance. I traveled to Japan a lot, and I attended these hi fi shows, and I noticed how people are focused on completely different priorities there. Because apartments are very small in Japan. And therefore nobody buys a traditional stereo system with big speakers and all that. Everybody essentially listens in headphones in a tiny little spot, usually on a train, on their way to work or back home. So that culture creates a necessity for smaller things. And then for some reason, it just kind of stuck with me. I like when, essentially, when you travel, you don't want to log around a 19 inch rack or even like a 500 series lunchbox thing. That's the way we're trying to make these things small. But getting back to passport vo, the restriction there was basically the same one that was popularized by Henry Ford, who said that you can have your Model T in any color as long as it's black. Yeah. So basically, we have this box, and whatever you want to have must fit. Speaker C: In the box, which was good. And it was an interesting exercise, me being the guinea pig who potentially is going to be the person who uses this. Know, I didn't want it too technical and trying to get the terminology something that people like me would understand. So that was an interesting exercise for all of us as well. Speaker A: There was a lot of pushing and pulling between the Andrew Robert hemispheres of the design team. : There was? Speaker C: Yes, that's right. : Yes. I was wanting to keep it flexible and let it do more things. Be both. The. For instance, I wanted to be the interface that you could take on the road or leave in your control room and run it as your whole studio interface, or have it in your booth. And it could work in any place. And Andrew was like, I just want to travel with this was. Speaker C: It was kind of interesting because we were the polar opposite. So you had Robert on one side, me on the other side, and George and Robbo in the middle. George particularly, trying to make sense of. Speaker A: Our nonsensical and the filter. And I was trying to condense down everything. What they wanted to George was the traffic Michael. So that Michael didn't end up having to be the traffic cop. It got out of control at one point, expand at one point. Remember distinctly, I was like, wait, I was supposed to be protecting my. : I think that was important, giving Michael one point of communication. Because it would have been maddening for him. : Exactly. Well, I have to say, I actually enjoyed the process. I mean, there was a lot of creativity and ideation throughout the whole thing. And if you have. I love ideation myself. So I'm not really necessarily against it, opposed to it, as long as it eventually comes to a solid, well defined feature. Set, which I think we have. So that whole process that worked very well for me. And I do appreciate George coming in as a traffic cop and essentially directing. Speaker B: A lot of that traffic and an architect as well. Can I just say, with all the drawings that he had to do, I. Speaker A: Had fun trying to figure out a way to draw a signal flow diagram, which I'd never really done anything. And I know there's proper nomenclature and symbolism and all sorts of stuff in drawing one. I didn't know that, so I just did my own thing. But it really was cool because it helped me tremendously see it, understand what goes to what. And we revised that signal flow diagram. Oh, jeez, I don't know, seven or eight times, probably. Speaker C: Yeah, probably a lot more. Speaker B: A million times. : I think it was the blend of having the signal flow diagram so you could really see what was exactly going to happen combined with the mockup of the final device so you could get an imagination of how it was really going to work in the field. I think we really came up with something that fits sentrins in the sense that it fits, obviously, the form factor, but it's super flexible and unique. You're not finding this absolutely any other interface. : No, I think it'll continue to be unique because it is so purpose built that other manufacturers will look at it and go, why? Speaker C: That's right, exactly. Speaker B: Because there's nothing else out there that's been purpose built for voiceover artists. I think that was the initial motivation. For years, voiceover artists have had to take stuff that's built for music, for music engineers, and rework it to make it for voiceover. : And it seems like this is such a niche industry that a larger manufacturer might not necessarily see a lot of business potential there. So I think that was a good match between our size being a smaller company and then a market being smaller that we were like, okay, that makes sense. : I think you see that in its price point. Speaker C: Yeah. : Someone who's looking at it really basically goes, I can get a two channel USB interface, two microphones USB interface for $100. : No, this is not that. : If you see that in there, then you're not seeing what this is. Speaker A: Yeah, it's not for you. There's almost like when you set something at a price point, you're trying to give a very clear, I mean, not only you're saying that it's worth it, obviously, but you're making a very clear statement that this is priced for professionals and it's worth every penny to a professional who will understand the value. And we've already had people stand up and say, I believe it. I see what you're saying. And they've blunt down the cash. : And let's be honest, for a working voiceover professional, not everybody, of course, but a lot of those guys can make that much money in 15 seconds. : Pays for itself in one gig. Speaker A: That is true. Speaker C: Exactly. Speaker A: We knew that pricing was going to be tricky, but we also knew that we had a restricted space in which we had to work. We wanted the value to be there. But we also have to make a profit. Michael has to make a profit. We had ideas that would have driven the price even higher quite a bit that we could have implemented, but we didn't want to do that. There's a certain point where we thought, let's keep it under that. : Well, I remember one was how we handled the, and this is actually something I have a question with, with the English Channel, we wanted to make the passport flexible enough to use an external preamp instead of the built in one. And I know that was important to Andrew. And one of the things I find with the English Channel is that when you come out line level XLR and you go into the courtcaster, turning the courtcaster down is not enough. You got to pad the other stages beforehand to get it because you're kind of feeding a mic pre into a mic pre. And I remember that was one of the things where we had to accept that we were going to go through that chip, if I remember right, and we didn't get a pure bypass of. Speaker A: The mic because that was going to raise the parts count and the cost in other ways. And it was such a, the switching, it was something where it was going to add cost to make a very small percentage of users. : It would not have made a difference to most users. Speaker C: But even based on that, I have to say that if you look at the new Neumann interface, how much is that thing? : Like one, $200, right? Speaker C: No, more than that. It will be like over 2000 us. : 18, from what I understand. : 18, yeah. I'm sorry. And it doesn't do as much as the. Speaker C: And also when you're talking about having, bypassing the internal preamp, it doesn't. : Oh, really? Speaker C: It doesn't. Like, nowhere on that new Neumann interface can you bypass a preamp. Speaker A: Fascinating. : I would wonder if that's a subject of pride. We give you the best preamp in the land. Why would you want to bypass that? Speaker B: I would suggest that would be the case, yeah. Speaker A: Well, the irony is that they sell a preamp like they sell a very expensive preamp. Outboard preamp. So you would think that they would have that. : Do you want to know what device that is? It's the reincarnation, it's the perennial. It's like a locust that comes out of the ground every eight years. And the last one that emerged out of the ground was the mini me. Speaker A: The mini me from Apigee. : The apigee mini me. Yeah. Badass preamp. Badass converter. Speaker A: Yeah. And soft clipping. : It had that limiter but really expensive interface that's just going to. I'm expensive. I'm going to be the best kind of thing is what it's trying to be, but it's not flexible. : Mini me is not a convincing name. Speaker A: If that movie hadn't come, I'm sure. : When that movie came true, but really, the mini me, it wants to be the original ad 1000, which I have several of those. And those are great. : Yeah. Speaker A: But they don't use Firewire or USB. Right. : The mini me, I believe, is USB. Speaker A: Are you sure? I don't think so. : I'm pretty sure it runs as USB and a separate pre, but I don't. Speaker A: Think it has any protocol. See, that's the thing. As soon as you add a protocol to the unit, like a USB protocol, a firewall protocol, you're now dating your product. It is now locked in time. It's now going to be obsolete at some point. Speaker C: Correct. Speaker A: Like this happened. Firewire. Actually, Firewire just became officially obsolete with, I think, Ventura, if you have a Firewire device. : So even if you have like a firewired, a thunderbolt adapter, it doesn't matter. Speaker A: They dropped off the protocol. It's gone. Poof. : Well, the lightning jack is about to go the way of the dodo. Speaker A: Yes, that's right. : Really? : Because of Europe. Speaker A: That's a whole other can of worms. Right, Michael? Because I know you spent a long time dealing with the lightning port and the. What is it called? Made for Apple MFA? : Mfi. Mfi. Made for iPhone. Speaker A: Right. Made for iPhone. And wasn't that like a major stumbling block to getting the first mixer face built and designed? : Correct. We started down that path in our hi fi devices because we wanted to make these headphone amplifiers that plugged into the phone because a lot of people started moving their music collection onto the phone and using the phone as the playback device. And then that kind of translated into recording products as well. So Apple decided to keep that walled garden ecosystem all to themselves. And then as a manufacturer, making a peripheral device, a product that would interface with the Apple iPhone, iPad, et cetera. You had to go through a lengthy bureaucratic process to establish yourself as a registered developer, essentially in the MFI ecosystem. And they policed that hard to the point. I mean, it got ridiculous. So the lightning jack actually is quite sophisticated. There's a chip inside and that chip has a serial number, a laser etched serial number inside. So every lightning jack in the world has a unique serial number. Believe it or not, this information is less relevant now. But it used to be relevant before. So what had happened is if there was a cable, a lightning cable, lightning to USB, that was not made per spec, any cable that you made as an MFI manufacturer had to be certified by an Apple approved lab and it had to do all the things that a lightning cable had to do. : It was very annoying when they started. : They enforced it all the time. And then what they ended up doing is there's been a plethora of chinese cables that were not approved. So Apple was able, because they actually had control over the chips inside of the lightning checks, they were able to remotely disable cables. Speaker A: Wow. : And then we still get these calls. It's like, man, I plug this lightning to USB cable into your product and it doesn't pass audio. It's your product. No, it's the cable. That cable just hasn't paid the fee. And by the way, you had to pay the fee to Apple. If you were MFI developer, the manufacturer of that cable either didn't pass the test or didn't pay the fee or whatever and their cable had been remotely disabled, which is bizarre. But that went on for a while and after a while we were know we're too small to be able to deal with this because there were like constant updates. : So then you just have to get your own interface adapter so you couldn't plug straight into the phone anymore. You had to have some stupid dongle so Apple could get their fee. : They got their fee one way or another. But now, thanks to Europe, it's just going to be USBC and the whole lightning adapter is no more. Speaker A: Oh, so let me ask you, this is the MFI certification, whatever you want to call it. Is that now dead because of USBC or is it still in there somewhere? : There is no special communication happening anymore because USBC is supposed to be generic. You had to announce yourself and you had to be in the database and that's how they tracked you essentially. But now there is no communication there. And then, so now it's just like a Windows machine. You plug a peripheral, a USB peripheral into a Windows machine. And if it's a generic peripheral, it pulls up a generic driver and knows what to do, knows how to work with it. With Mac, it's been like that forever. And they've written great drivers, a lot better than Windows. So that any audio interface, you plug it into a Mac, it works right away. Speaker A: Yeah, as long as it's core. What do they call it? Compliant or core audio compliant? : Core audio. Core. Audio compliant, right, exactly. : And then. So it's going to be exactly like that with the iPhone and iPads. Been like that with the iPad for about a year now. So just one less hurdle to jump over, which that's progress. Yes. And that's good, because we had this conversation the other day when you were coaching me on how to make the proper connections here, and I was pulling my hair out, trying to get things working, and I realized that it works in this environment, not in that environment and all that. Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. Honestly, when I was writing that, I went down the rabbit on the developer page of Apple. Right. To understand better how the system works. And there was like seven distinctly different and unique modes of operation. : Because it's trying to make all these decisions for you. It's like, can we interrupt this phone call? Can we interrupt this movie? Speaker A: Right, right. Oh, my gosh, it is so complicated. : It is pretty annoying. Speaker A: It's all complicated on the developer side so that you, the user, don't have to think about it, but they make those decisions for you. And that's what runs us into trouble as pros. I wish, again, because of iPhone 15 Pro and the new chipset, maybe this is going to change. But yeah, I wish we could really control our devices and say, I want to use this as the input. I want to use that as the output. I want to send this over here. : On the Windows side, there is this protocol that's been around for a while called ASIO. ASIO is the one that is direct to device. It was developed that way a long time ago. : It was made by Steinberg. : Yeah. And that would not be interrupted if you're playing a YouTube video or phone call comes in. Your session continues to be solid. Nowadays. : The problem with ASIO is that it can't share very well. : The whole point of it is that you shouldn't share. It should be like point to point, indestructible. You know what I mean? : On the macOS, it's got it with core audio where it shares it just fluidly yet. And the only thing that you have to make sure of which is the same with any situation is you just keep. If I'm sharing it, we have to agree on what sample rate we're going to be at. The device can't be at more than. Speaker A: One sample rate, but there's still weird stuff on the Apple side. Where is the volume up and down button on the keyboard going to change the output level of my device? : Exactly. Speaker A: I don't know. Is the gain, input gain setting on Mac OS going to be effective on the input level? : Or would that be if that device is set as the output in system preferences, then your knob becomes a control if that device is controllable. Not all devices are controllable. And you'll see that some of them, if you select them as the output, the slider becomes grayed out. Speaker A: But who decides that? The manufacturer of the device, the writer of the driver or the Mac audio. : Stack or whatever, that's the device. : In reality, it's everything. It's a little bit of both. So some decisions Apple has to make, some decision manufacturer tries to make, but then Apple could reverse those decisions at their own volition. Anytime you have a competition between a whole bunch of sound sources, like phone movie playing, another movie playing in this other window, and then your audio thing, the system has to decide what's the priority, which of these programs really has to be streamed and which other ones have to be muted, or do you want to just mix everything together? Which is kind of madness, right? Speaker A: Yeah. IPhone does some weird stuff like, I know we're going down a rabbit hole. : It's very useful. It's like the way a Nexus device works. They're like patch cables. And if you send two devices to go out the same patch cable, it just mixes everything together. The Wasopi Windows driver is a little bit more flexible and a little bit more core audio like than mixes. : It mixes everything, and they worked hard on doing that. Here's a problem, because it has to mix so many different streams, again, from these movies and radio stations and everything else that you could be listening to and watching at the same time in the same Windows computer. What they do is they have to align the sample rates from all these different sources. The process of aligning the sample rates results in a delay in latency. So that's completely inapplicable to music recording. Robbie would know about that. And then, so if you're watching a movie and the sound comes in 30 milliseconds later, you don't know it. It doesn't matter if you're recording music and sound comes back 30 milliseconds later, it ruins the take. : So I wonder if the latency in Wasapi is similar to the latency in core audio. Because anything that's native, every audio engineer knows it's more. : It's a lot more. In Wasapi, core audio is just very well tuned. : It's like Wasapi and fast. It's like Wasapi and ASIO combined in a way. : Wasapi generally introduces delay, and it introduces a lot of convenience at the price of the delay, whereas ASIO is as little delay as you can have. So essentially, the delay through the computer is about two milliseconds each way, and then the rest of it is the interface. But it's point to point. There are no decisions to make, so there's no pausing to think whether we should do it this way or that way. That's the beauty of ASIO, and core audio is very much like that. Speaker A: Since we're talking about Windows a little bit, is it too early for you to tell us, Michael, when you connect the passport Vo with its two USB buses or two USB interfaces to a pc, is the best choice for the user, in most cases going to be, what do they call it? Mme or Windows classic wave driver or direct sound. What's going to be the optimal setting? Do you think? : Wasapi usually is the best if you know what you're doing and you're not sending several different streams into your interface? Speaker A: Right, right. And you won't be, because with this design, each USB bus is basically a simple two in, two out. Exactly interface. Right. So the hardware, all that mixing that we try to do with software, and sometimes not very successfully, is being handled in the analog domain or internally inside the unit. : Right. Speaker A: So we don't have to even worry about that anymore. : That was a very smart idea or path. : That's the beauty of it. No drivers? No, yes. Nothing to. That's the goal. : Yeah. You could have two separate applications running at the same time. One could be sharing applications such as source connect. The other one can be a recording application such as DAW, local DAW. Speaker A: And then Adobe audition is a popular choice on Windows. : Those applications could actually meet inside of the device, inside of passport Vo, and not really conflict with each other as they would be if you were trying to mix inside the machine. : This is why we did it, because on Windows, this ability to have two applications use the same device at the same time can cause huge tech support issues. Huge. And one approach is to basically have someone like George help you out and figure it out. Going into drivers and turning them off of exclusive mode and things like that. And then crossing your fingers that it works. Speaker A: No, I have. Mike McConaughey will do that. I won't touch that stuff anymore on Windows. : Or just do it this way and dedicate one interface to one application, the other interface to the other, and then do all your cross patching and your blending and the analog domain with. : That's unique. Nobody else does that, right. Speaker A: And that internally. Michael, just to make that really clear, it's an analog signal path, that's all. It's staying completely analog? : Yes. It's an analog mixer which has two inputs which happen to be digital streams from the computer. Speaker A: But they've been converted from digital to. : Analog to analog and become analog. Mixing in analog introduces zero latency. It's that old technology. We're going back to the british invasion. And it's seamless, essentially. There are no conflicts when you're mixing an analog. Speaker A: Yeah, no sample rates to coordinate. : George? It's a bit like when you use the Bering interface to plug externally back. Speaker A: Into someone else's problem solver. : It's that, but it's all in the box with knobs and switches to control it. Instead of like, you could have your. Speaker A: Doll running at 24, 96, maybe 24 bit 96. And you can have your zoom or source connect running at whatever the heck the client wants, sample rate it needs to be. And they will not step on each other's toes at all. You don't have to worry about that. : Yeah, that's completely transparent in the analog domain. So I think that was a brilliant move. Speaker A: I can't wait. That's such a cool thing. : Hey, listen, I can't wait either. So a small development on that front. I know everybody wants to know status. As mentioned before, we have three separate paths here. And we're about to choose one with regards to the actual USB chip. So I've laid out all of the analog circuitry. It's already done. So all that mixing that we've just talked about, that's all already in the design. Speaker A: Cool. : It's designed and it's waiting to be prototyped. I am pausing and not sending this to prototyping because there's one additional block that needs to be finalized. And that block is the USB portion of the design. Actually, there's two USB portions of the design because, as we just said, there's two USB ports and there's two different computers that you could connect this thing to at the same time. And then it would then blend between the signals from those two computers. So for the USB chip that goes inside of there, the two USB chips, we learned recently, unfortunately, that the chip that we've been using for like twelve years or so is now out of production. And the manufacturer does have a newer version, but it's larger and more expensive. But larger part is more important here because, yes, we do have that small box and it just wouldn't fit. So we started a big search for another chip. We found a manufacturer in Taiwan, which is a smaller manufacturer, and it makes a chip that is smaller also. And that seems to fit the bill. But we wanted to make sure that we kind of wanted to vet them. Speaker A: Yeah, you don't just slap any random chip in there and hope for the. : You know, it's like a couple of guys in an office. Are you going to be around next year? So I have a friend in Taiwan who visited them yesterday and sent me a lengthy email. Anyway, so he visited them. He lives in neighboring cities. It's an hour drive for him, not that big a deal. So he popped over and he had a meeting and he said it was a very pleasant conversation. Taiwan is where they make all of the chips pretty much in the world these days. So they use a couple of foundries. Foundries. A plant that makes chips. And then, so they use two very reputable suppliers for that. And everything is well tested. I was like, do they test these things? How's the reliability? Do they have any large customers? Turns out this company is not well known in America, in the west yet, but they are known in China, and they're shipping significant volume into China. So I think there's the reason to believe that it's going to be a reliable supplier. And so my friend there in Taiwan who actually works for large contract manufacturers, like, yeah, you should go ahead and work with them. Not a problem. I don't see a problem. Speaker A: Milestone moment right here, folks. : Just happened to yesterday, as a matter of fact. So we're like, oh, okay, well, then, thank you. So we're not concerned about their longevity and all that. So there was also a third path, which was there's still a stock available of the old chip that's gone out of production and we can put that in there. But that would just kind of be a step backwards, putting something in the product that you know is not going to be made anymore. : Are there any features on the new chip? Like, it goes up to 384. : It does. : Does your taxes. : It does do your taxes. That would be important. But the 384, I think less so I'm joking, of course, because who needs 384 in real life? Audiophiles love their 384. Except there's no content to play. But you got to buy your DAC. : It's the album of mouse farts. : To each his own. Speaker C: Yeah. Speaker A: One other thing I want to touch on before we wrap it is I also know that you have invested in a rapid prototype, or what would you call it, a prototyping. : You can make your own boards now. : Right? It's a pick and place machine. That's the official name. Speaker A: Pick and place. Got you. : Yeah. Electronic components these days don't go through little holes in the side of the pc board. Instead, they're planar. Yeah. They're just put on the surface. And some of these components are smaller than 1 mm by 1 mm. They're really tiny. Speaker A: Yeah. : And then it used to be ten years ago that they're larger. Maybe three, four, 5 can actually use tweezers and just put them on the board yourself. It'd take forever, but you could do it right. And then you'd put this whole board with all these components that you just very carefully put on the board, and you would put it inside of an oven and heat it up for about ten minutes. There'd be a particular heat profile, and that would solidify all of the solder and then connect all the components together. And after you had a board for prototyping, that was a thing to do. Nowadays, components are so small that even if you have a magnifying glass, if you partied the night before, your hand is not as steady anymore. So therefore, assembling these things. And I'm not saying that people should not party, but it kind of puts a cramping your style anyway. So this automated pick and place machine that we have now does that for you. It's a robot, and it just kind of like, has a tiny little suction cup at the end of a needle. So it just moves over the hand, moves over to where you have your components on a reel. They're in a bobbin. This is reel. And it just picks one up by applying a little bit of suction, kind of sucks it out of the reel and then moves it to an appropriate place on the board and just kind of releases gently. And it can handle things that a human hand cannot handle. So from that standpoint, it's a huge benefit. And it actually does it fast, and it doesn't party the night before, from what I know, it doesn't ask for. : Raises and it doesn't. : Yeah. Speaker A: So I have so many questions. I mean, I'm dying to see one of these working in action. I'm sure I could probably find it on YouTube. But how long does it take to populate a board that would go inside the mixer face or pork? : About ten minutes at this point. Speaker A: Wow. : Whereas if you do it by hand, you're probably, like, at it for a couple of hours. Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. : And you're developing cramps. : When does it get to the point where it's like, just by order? When does it get to the point where you can make your board, you can assemble your board, you've got a 3d printer. Because I really like the case for the english channel. A lot of manufacturing is like, okay, we're going to make a product, and then there you have 60,000 of some plastic thing, and then maybe they sell, maybe they don't, and you just have a lot of extra waste and they're done. Here's like making these things as needed, right? : 3D printing. Yeah, we make everything for order, and we've been sheepish about it for a while until we got to the point where we figured out how to make it look good and also make it reliable so it doesn't break. So these 3D printed parts at this point are completely usable. I mean, they're not toys anymore. They're functional pieces of mechanical design. And we love that because we can change colors. You can get the tray, the commander console, we call it, for the english channel. You can get it in lime, lemon, red, blue, white, black, whatever, gray. And this is so easy for us to do otherwise we would have to order thousands of each color and then store them somewhere. And now we just have these reels of filament, which is this just essentially plastic out of which everything's being made, and then we can make them to order. So that's really great. And then as far as how long does it take? Well, the box that we make everything in is still aluminum. So that box, fortunately for us, we make a lot of different products inside that same box. So we can order it by a boatload from the manufacturer because there is a minimum order quantity. But we figured that we will go through the entire order because we will put different products in that same box, and that way we can afford to buy a whole bunch at once. Speaker A: So one more board thing is amazing. So after you've dropped tiny, tiny little components over this little board, so is that the point where it goes into the oven? And how do you keep the little tiny, tiny, tiny pieces from moving around. : You squeeze paste, solder, solder paste, the official name. You squeeze a layer of this gooey. It's just like toothpaste, but it's dark gray. And it has the property that when you heat it up, it solidifies and it becomes metal. But basically you get a stencil, which is this thin metal plate. Steel plate, very thin, less than a millimeter. And then holes for the components are laser cut inside of that steel plate. And then you put that steel plate over the board, line it up correctly, and then you use a squeegee to essentially squeeze that paste over the stencil. And then where the stencil has the holes, the paste drops through the holes onto the pc board and then forms the tiny little squares in appropriate places. Then they're a little sticky, just like toothpaste. And then when a component drops onto these two squares, for example, if component has two pins, right, it kind of gets stuck in the paste and it doesn't move. And then you can handle the board. I mean, you don't want to throw the board because the components will fly off. But if you carefully handle it and carefully move it into the oven, then the components will not move. And then what actually happens in the oven is a beautiful thing due to surface tension. Essentially, the components, once they heat up, they line up because the tiny little solder bolts. So essentially you have liquid metal at that point. If you remember the movie terminator, there was this other terminator guy that was essentially made out of liquid metal, and he could reassemble himself at all points. Remember that? Speaker A: Oh, yeah. : T two. Yeah, that's liquid tension is like when liquid gets together, it just kind of just forms this one thing wants to make a ball. Wants to make a ball. And that is what allows these tiny little components to get soldered to the pads in a very even sort of glowing pattern where all the solder gets utilized and none of it is left around because it all kind of tenses up and kind of sucks into one bowl in each little pad. Speaker A: That's cool, man. Thanks for describing that. That's really neat. : Michael, I actually had one quick question with the faces. Can you cut your own faces right now? : When you say faces, what are you referring to? : Like, all your pieces are made out of the same metal, sort of two pieces of metal. : Oh, I understand. : And right now, they always have the same four outside screw holes to hold them together. But then on the top of it, there's different holes for different knobs. And what I'm asking is, do you need to make seven holes in this one, three slots for a different switch. And you're able to do that all at your place now. I mean, could you theoretically just. : No, we still do it at a supplier, but. Good question. Yes. So the official term for this is platform strategy, is when you can make a lot of different things out of one thing. Another official term, if you want to keep going with the MBA speak. Design for postponement is what we're using here, if you want to be official about it, which means that you can make the decision on what the heck it is that you're building at the very last step. Right. Which also allows 3d printing is the same thing. You postpone the differentiation of the product, and then you can actually choose what you're building the day when you ship that thing. Right. Toyota has pioneered that in the 80s where with the whole just in time strategy and all that, because they were able to reduce the amount of stuff that they held at their warehouses, which were huge anyway. So what happens with these products is, on top of the product is this plastic overlay. It's actually a sticky sticker. Yeah, it's a thick sticker made out of polycarbonate. It's a polycarbonate overlay with an adhesive backing that we very carefully lay in this existing hole. And then that sticker we print. And then, fortunately, we have a supplier who doesn't want us to print thousands of them. They can print 100 at a time. And then those stickers themselves are not that expensive. And therefore we can get 100 stickers of each product and then essentially put the sticker on the product. The day we assemble the product and the day we ship it to the customer, which allows us to be a lot more flexible than a traditional manufacturing plant. : So then if you have the ability to drill your own holes and slots at some point, whatever CNC machine that. : Is, we have that. Speaker B: There you go. Speaker C: You do. : I haven't let you into the warehouse yet. You should come back. : I'd love to. Speaker C: Yeah, he's on his way. Speaker B: He's leaving now. : And on that note, as Andrew would say, yes. Speaker A: Well, that was fun. : Is it over? Speaker C: The pro audio suite with thanks to Tribut and austrian audio recorded using source Connect, edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Robo. Got your own audio issues? Just ask robo.com tech support from George Thetech Wittam. Don't forget to subscribe to the go and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say, g'day. Drop us a note at our websiteprodiosuite.com.

This week, we deep dive into the English Channel from Centrance. Special guest Michael Goodman chats about how it came about, the many unique setups and creative uses of the English Channel by voice artists and content creators alike. Plus, we explore its features, and with Robbo, Robert and Michael all using one for the show, there's plenty of tips and tools to help you get the most out of this impressive piece of kit, or inspire you to go check one out for yourself. A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth... https://tribooth.com/ And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear.. https://austrian.audio/ We have launched a Patreon page in the hopes of being able to pay someone to help us get the show to more people and in turn help them with the same info we're sharing with you. If you aren't familiar with Patreon, it's an easy way for those interested in our show to get exclusive content and updates before anyone else, along with a whole bunch of other "perks" just by contributing as little as $1 per month. Find out more here..   https://www.patreon.com/proaudiosuite     George has created a page strictly for Pro Audio Suite listeners, so check it out for the latest discounts and offers for TPAS listeners. https://georgethe.tech/tpas If you haven't filled out our survey on what you'd like to hear on the show, you can do it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZWT5BTD Join our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/proaudiopodcast And the FB Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/357898255543203 For everything else (including joining our mailing list for exclusive previews and other goodies), check out our website https://www.theproaudiosuite.com/ “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.” Hunter S Thompson Summary In this episode of the Pro Audio Suite, our hosts—George Wittam, Robert Marshall, Darren 'Robbo' Robertson, and Andrew Peters—offer an insightful review of Centrance products, particularly focusing on the English Channel. The team is joined by special guest Michael Goodman from Centrance, who sheds light on the technology behind these innovative audio solutions. Listeners will gain an understanding of the technical nuances of the English Channel, such as its British EQ, clean modern circuitry, and wide frequency response, which altogether emulate the classic analog console experience with a distinct English style. In an in-depth discussion, the panel explores the creative uses of the product, and Goodman explains the motivation behind its unique design, such as the five db gain jump between products which correlates with a price difference. Moreover, the episode delves into the features of the Portcaster and SoBox, highlighting how these devices can send audio to multiple recorders, and allowing one device to control another for an expanded multichannel setup. The challenges and eccentricities of integrating these tech solutions into a working studio setup are candidly discussed, including some unconventional methods they would normally not recommend to voiceover actors. To cap it off, the show offers a quick preview of the next episode where Michael Goodman will return to discuss the Passport Vo, making it a must-listen for audio professionals looking to enhance their tech arsenal and push the boundaries of their creative workflow. #ProAudioSuite #VoiceoverTech #CentranceSolutions Timestamps (00:00:00) Introduction to Pro Audio Suite (00:00:52) Centrance's English Channel Review (00:07:07) Comparison: Jasmine Preamp and Portcaster (00:09:01) English Channel as a Portable Voice Recorder (00:13:16) Modern Breakthroughs in EQ Circuitry (00:15:29) Features of the English Channel Parametric EQ (00:19:15) Instamano: The Mono Blend Knob for Instagram (00:25:40) Portcaster's Monitoring and Output Capabilities (00:28:28) SoBox: Link Switches Explained Transcript Speaker A: Y'all ready? Be history. Speaker B: Get started. Speaker C: Welcome. : Hi. Speaker C: Hi. : Hello, everyone to the pro audio suite. : These guys are professional. Speaker C: They're motivated with tech. To the Vo stars, George Wittam, founder of source elements Robert Marshall, international audio engineer Darren Robbo Robertson and global voice Andrew Peters. Thanks to Triboo, austrian audio making passion heard source elements George the tech Wittam and Robbo and AP's international demo. To find out more about us, check theproaudiosuite.com line up. Speaker B: Learner. Here we go. : And don't forget the code. Trip a P 200. That will get you $200 off your tribooth. Now, I should say, before we start the show, a disclaimer. What you are about to listen to is what we would not advise voiceover actors to do. That's all I'm going to say. Speaker A: Do as I say, not as I do. : Yeah, exactly. We have a special guest today from Centrance, Michael Goodman. G'day, Michael. Speaker B: Hello, gentlemen. Pleasure to be here. : It's lovely to have you. Now, today's review is about sentrance itself, but also the English Channel. And I know two of the people are using english channels as we speak. And one has done some funky little setup to his laptop. And that, of course. : But Robert, I just kind of like that setup where I use the TRRs cable going into the laptop. I just like it because it's wrong. One of the things, actually, two things that I ran into and, Michael, maybe you can explain to me a little bit. But I found that when I use the English Channel with the xlrs going across the top, when you get into the portcaster, you're hitting the mic preamp with an amplified signal. And you end up having to not use as much gain on the mic preamp over on the soapbox as you want. Because even with the pads turned down. And I think I ended up using the pad in the English Channel as well to try to pad it back down so I could get into the meat of the soapbox in terms of processing, the compressor especially, and the deesser as well. So anyways, what I did is I have the mic going in the xlr going out and over into the english channel. And then I have an XLR cable going out which feeds into the. Whatever, the second ring of a tip ring ring sleeve jack. And that goes into my Mac. And then out of my Mac is the tip ring sleeve. The normal stereo output of that jack. And that goes to a female connector. And I take the output of that. I have an 8th inch to 8th inch or an aux cable. I take the output of that and I plug it into the 34 input of the port caster. And I also take another 8th inch cable, aux cable, and I go line out of the English Channel and into the phone TRRs input of the portcaster as well. And that's how I monitor my own voice. So I have two knobs on the Portcaster. I do not have a USB going into the computer, just a USB going into the power headphones 34 being fed in, which is the computer return and my microphone coming in through the TRRS channel two input. So I have the three four knob for you guys, and I have the channel two knob for my own headphones. And voila. Fully processed microphone with EQ using the built in Macintosh input and output through a TRRS cable. Doesn't sound too bad, does it? Speaker B: Well, first of all, I have to hand it to you. You get the prize for the most creative, innovative use of this technology. And it still sounds good. Speaker A: Can I just say, also the most convoluted. Speaker B: Seriously, I guess it is a statement about the universality of this thing, because I hadn't thought about that use. Normally, what we'd recommend everybody to use is the english channel takes a microphone on the input and gives you a USB output that you plug into your computer. It does have really high quality inlook to digital and digital converters inside. So we believe it's better than the converters inside of a typical computer such as a Mac or PC. And therefore you'll get more audio file sound quality that way. But look, I mean, there's so many Gazintas and Gazawtas in that thing, you can probably slice it many different ways. : Well, here's where I came up with that setup. And I decided to do this setup because I wanted to use the soapbox and the full processing, and I wanted to do something different as well. But where I first came up with that setup, and I think it works really well, is with the Jasmine mic pre, because then it's the same thing. You have the XLR feeding out and then you have the computer just return back to the line input and the Jasmine mic pre itself. The headphone already blends your headphones, your input, your mic input with the headphones. So you don't need the second Aux cable that I'm using here. But it's certainly a great way to literally use the Jasmine mic pre with a computer. If you just want to get the Jasmine mic pre. Speaker B: That's actually true. And to be honest with you, we have received feedback about the Jasmine mic pre. One thing that it sorely lacks, apparently according to some users, is a USB audio interface. People are like, why don't you just put a USB jack that actually does audio on that thing, not just power. So then the Jasmine preamp basically turns into a micport Pro with a line level input and a mixer so that you can bring some music into your program or just listen to a backing track and sing along with it or play along with it, something like that. It really just becomes a mic port Pro at that point. With a slightly better preamp? : I don't think so. It becomes like a focus, right? Blue ISA one where it has a Q mix input or a return channel so you can monitor in low latency what comes out of your daw. Speaker B: If it had a USB audio interface, then it would be exactly like those things. : No, the focusrite ISA desktop is not an audio interface. It has no USB. But it's a preamp with two return channels so you can monitor low latency out of your daw. There's not a ton of mic preamps that do it, but the Jasmine does it too, and it's a super useful feature even without the USB interface. Speaker B: In developing the English Channel, we had to face a couple of decision points, because originally it was actually four devices. It was the Jasmine preamp followed by the dynamics box, followed by the EQ, the black cab, and followed by the audio interface, which is the podcaster. But four devices that just looked like a lot in front of you just looked way too complex. So a couple of voiceover actors heard about that and they're like, can you please put the preamp inside of the soapbox? So that's what we did, and thereby we made jasmine preamp pretty much obsolete in our product line. It's a foster child. Sad to say. : I liked it. So the preamp is the same in the jasmine as the soapbox? Speaker B: Yes. : Can I ask what's the preamp in the passport? Speaker B: The preamp is the same all across, so we call it the jasmine preamp. It's a custom designed discrete transistor preamp with a dual stage. : But the courtcaster doesn't have a Jasper. Speaker B: Cordcaster is portcaster with a very small modification. It's basically the same as Portcaster. : So it is a Jasmine preamp in that one as well? Speaker B: Yes, everywhere is the same preamp. : So basically all your preamps are the jasmine. Speaker B: What differs between products is the amount of gain available. So jasmine preamp, if you need the possible theoretical lowest noise, somehow it's different somehow. : Even though it's a jasmine preamp. It's a better jasmine preamp. Speaker B: Yeah. So we monkey with the gain inside the unit. : Wow. Because the Micport Pro that's got, I think it's 65 db gain. Speaker B: Is that 65? And then soapbox has 70 and the Jasmine preamp standalone has 74. 75. : Wow. Speaker B: There's like a five db jump and then there's a corresponding price difference. : I haven't got one, but I know that generously you're going to send one for a review. The Micport Pro, and I know it's been around for a long time, but this is the latest version of it that you've got, which has been around for how long now, the New York. Speaker B: One, the latest Micport Pro has been around since. I want to say that 2018, the. : First Micport Pro was what, 2008? Speaker B: 2009. Eight. You're right. Eight. : I still miss my original. : Well, someone's got it now. They're enjoying it. Speaker A: Hello. : And probably got your laptop as well. : He's got both the laptops. He got a bag full of stuff. Speaker A: Might not be a he. Come on, let's not get sexist here. : Yeah. : Someone who identifies as a thief. Speaker B: Yes, exactly. : I identify as a thief. Speaker A: Yes, indeed. : Now, Michael, with the english channel, who were you looking at when you were designing this? What was your market? Speaker B: The mirror? Speaker A: Before you answer that, I actually want to take you one step back inside your twisted mind. Speaker B: I appreciate that. Speaker A: Where did you come up with the idea for this? Speaker B: So the name of the product, the English Channel. : I'm curious about the name. Speaker B: The name, obviously, is it uses British Egyu and everything else from a channel stripper on a british console, analog console. And therefore it's called the English Channel. So it's a channel from a british console. Now, you can argue that british consoles have been responsible for one of the most prolific periods in the history of the music industry, where in the 70s, early eighty s, a lot of really cool music was produced. I'm not saying that today music is bad, not at all. All music matters, obviously, but I just happen to like a lot of music that was made in the late 70s anyway, so that's the name. And it's sort of kind of a nod to that era. A lot of our customers who buy the English Channel are from that era. They have experience with analog technology, and to them that feels good. Now, how did the product come about? There's really two ways to think about it. First of all, we couldn't get any digital chips during the COVID and so we couldn't build the Micport Pro and podcaster mixerface, all those other things. And I was sitting on a very short lounge chair at a hotel in Mexico, last vacation before COVID And I was kind of anticipating that they were going to hit some trouble. And then I said to myself, we should design some analog products because digital does not look good in the nearest future. And so that's how the analog channel came about. More of a business necessity than anything else. But then as it started to appear to materialize, I was practicing with it. And about that time, I started really recording YouTube videos for the sentrance YouTube channel on a weekly basis. It's a job. And because I traveled a lot, I ended up taking the english channel with me wherever I went. Like, for example, two weeks ago, I was in Indonesia at a trade show, and I had the English Channel, and I did some streams from the trade show floor, which sounded just like what we sound like right now. And I could get rid of the noise in the trade show floor was loud and all that. So I started realizing that this is actually a very cool product for a traveling content creator, because, again, as I said, I was looking at the mirror jokingly, but I happen to be a traveling content creator because I have this job of making videos for our YouTube channel and then podcasts, things like that. I did have a podcaster before, and podcaster obviously came out first, and that's great for doing podcasts, interviews. I know George uses it for that as well, but it doesn't have way to enhance your voice and then also get rid of the noise. Everybody who's starting out in the voice arts at first has to come against this fear of hearing their own voice, because we never know how our voice sounds like when it's recorded right until we have a lot of practice. And then, so I also had a fear of listening to my own voice. And I thought, I probably want a little bit more bass, maybe a little bit less treble here in this area. I kind of sound more confident if I do some of the enhancements. And then, so what this thing allows me to do is honestly develop confidence in public speaking, believe it or not, which is kind of like not the intended use of the product, but it gives me that ability to feel better about myself, which is an unintended psychological consequence of a technological product. : I have a question about the Eq. Is there anything, particularly on the technical side, that makes it a British Eq? I know that sometimes I found that the bandwidths can be pretty wide, and therefore, in that sense, sort of makes it a little bit more english in style, just the wider. I mean, they do get pretty. If I crank mine up here and I put it all the way on the left for the queue, you can kind of hear it. And it's pretty tight, but it doesn't sound like I'm sweeping a sine wave. And on the wide side, it's so wide, you can barely hear me sweeping that at all. Speaker B: It is pretty wide. I mean, it's almost like a surgical instrument. If you put it to 0.4 and is just a shelf almost. At the other extreme, the frequency response of that thing is quite wide. I don't have the spec sheet in front of me, but I wouldn't be surprised if it goes up to almost 100 khz. So it's very wide. It uses modern circuitry. I mean, this is not the circuitry from the course. There's been a lot of breakthroughs in analog technology since then, so that's why it's quiet and it allows us to do some tricks. It doesn't have transformers. So some of the Rupert neve technology color. Yeah, he loved his transformers. And they gave you that bass. They gave you that strange kind of phasing sound. I mean, a lot of people prefer that. And there are manufacturers of audio interfaces. There's one right here in Chicago that loves transformers as well. And those guys, we've had a shootout, and it was very interesting because I brought some of our gear to their studio, and then they had some of their interfaces, and we had an interface shootout. And the results of the shootout were inconclusive in that they loved theirs and I loved mine. : Did they want to do a black lion edition of the sentence? Speaker A: Yeah, of course. Speaker B: No, they hated our stuff because we didn't have transformers in it. And I was like, you guys, this doesn't sound natural. What goes in is not what goes out. And they're like, yeah, that's exactly the point. So different styles. : So talking about that, though, if you're talking about late 70s, early 80s when you were designing the English Channel, what sort of preamps were you thinking about? It sounds like you weren't thinking about Neve. You were thinking about maybe API. Speaker B: We wouldn't necessarily want know, copy somebody else's design, so that wouldn't be prudent for a lot of reasons, one of which just personal pride. We wanted to have our stuff. So you could argue that the whole concept of the british invasion and the british consul and all that is largely a psychological construct than any particular style of circuitry. Design. : It's not an homage to any. Like, this isn't a V 72 club. Speaker B: I wouldn't want to do that. There's so many people that say, oh, we make a microphone and it's the best U 87 this side of U 87, whatever. And that is a great marketing strategy for some people, but we decided not to do that. Like, okay, this is the Neve 1998, right? But in a different chassis. No, not at all. This is a sentence product that it is completely from ground up sentence. And then any marketing reference to Great Britain is an homage rather than any specific lift of any circuitry. : I don't think I can think of any smaller three band, fully parametric EQ on the market at all than this. Speaker A: No. Speaker B: You can find these graphic eqs and pedals a lot. : It's smaller than a 500 series module. It's like half the size. Speaker B: Exactly. I didn't have one either. : But find a three band parametric that's this small and it's XLR that's fully balanced. Speaker B: You should try it on some instruments. It's pretty cool. You should also try. So, box on a snare. I was blown away. Speaker A: Really? : Compressor is really good. Speaker B: Yeah, it's pretty nice. I have a video up on our website where I actually go through a history of the sound of the snare drum by turning the compressor knob on the soapbox. So without compression, it's essentially the 60s. With medium compression, it becomes the gated snare starts to come in, and then if you compress all the way. If you turn the knob all the way to the right, then it becomes the. Becomes the gated compressed snare. With the additional. Speaker A: I was going to say, you'd have to be winding the gate up as well. Right in the will. : Say, if I can make a request for the soapbox too, that the gate is an expander, that'd be my only request. Speaker B: So it doesn't pump as much or you can make it not pump as much. : So it slides down to its. Whatever range -60 or minus, even infinity. But it never just goes there, it always has a slope. It opens more gradually and closes more gradually. Because I don't know if I can do it. But you can kind of even sometimes you can hear someone breathe in, you can hear it take their breath and like, chop. Speaker B: It's pretty drastic. It's just basically on off. And it was designed to be that way. And it took a while to get the timing just right so that it covers the majority of applications. Obviously, we didn't have the space for a couple more knobs seems pretty quick. That was the point. So if you really use the gate, then it becomes pumpy. So it can be like that. : Yeah, well, I found a good way around that is to use the blend. Speaker B: The dry wet control. That's pretty much your answer. : Yeah, it effectively changes the amount. So it always leaves a little bit. And it doesn't sound quite as, like, cut. : It's like the range control. I like that. That mix of the dry wet will give you. Speaker B: That is a poor man's expander, if you wish. Speaker A: No, it's a sentence expander. : Yeah, that's what it is. Speaker B: The trick is old. The trick is not our invention. : So tell us about the instant mono. I think that's another one that it's kind of a unique thing that you don't find that behavior on all interfaces. Speaker B: The insta in Instant Instamano actually stands for Instagram. And we put that in portcaster. And what we've learned is that Instagram, originally, they may have changed that now, but originally it was mono. So therefore, if you connect a stereo usb audio interface to Instagram to do a live stream, then the left channel will go through and everybody will hear whatever's on the left channel, but the right channel will essentially be lost. So a musician who, let's say, is a guitar player and a singer at the same time. So a singer songwriter, they would plug the guitar into one channel and the voice, the vocal microphone into the other channel, and then only one of those things would come through. And that was extremely frustrating. We had an earlier product called Mixerface, where there was no blend, no stereo blend. It just two channels come in, two channels go out. : I've got a mixer, right? Speaker B: The older one didn't have that blend knob. Now, since COVID and since that whole idea of streaming from home came about, we learned that this is not good. And then that Instamano is essentially a mono switch for mono blend knob for Instagram, which essentially unifies or combines your microphone and your guitar that you plug into channels one and two and then sends that to Instagram. And then your fans hear both things. That's really what it's for. Now, why is it a blend knob and not a switch? Because I had a hole I needed to plug with a potentiometer, and it kind of felt good. : How does it work exactly? All the way left. Right goes all the way to left is all the way left. Speaker B: Yes. So when you turn it counterclockwise, which is to the left, you are printing. Mono printing. When I say printing, I mean, is sending a mono signal into Instagram. So, in your usb stream. : But what's it doing electrically? Is it bringing the right side fully over to the left side? Is that what it is? Speaker B: It's creating a monomix. So it takes 50% of the left and 50% of the right. It combines them together and creates a mono mix. And then it sends that mono mix to the left channel and that same exact mono mix to the right channel. That's the proper way of doing it. : So what happens if you have it 50 50, like straight up at 12:00 now what's. Speaker B: So then it's in between mono and stereo. And I am still trying to figure out a good use case for that. : Well, it's like faking headphones for stereo. If you want a little left right bleed. Speaker B: Yeah. : At the 12:00 position, it basically takes. Left is 100% left plus 50% right, and right is 100% right plus 50% left. Is that what's happening? Speaker B: It becomes 50 of, let's say 50 of each? Yeah. So it's slightly less than stereo. So now I have to correct myself. I said that I'm struggling to come up with a use case. I'm not. Because we make two microphones that you can plug into podcaster. These are tiny little mics that are housed inside the XLR shells. And then they are angled so that when you plug them into channels one and two over the podcaster, you form a xy stereo pair. And then at that point, portcaster becomes a stereo field recorder with two mics. And then you can record concert, a band, whatever, or sounds of nature, animals. We have people recording all kinds of things. Creeks, mountain creeks. And then. So there, what you can do is you can record in, like, full stereo. But sometimes if you're way too close to the source, the full stereo might actually sound uncomfortable. So in that case, you might want to reduce the width of the stereo perspective slightly. And that's where the mono stereo blend ability to kind of grow gradually between the two comes into play. Because I've stuck this actually big sewer in California about a year ago, and I recorded the sound of the mountain creek because I thought it would be cool. And I stuck the portcaster on a rock right next to gurgling water. Right. And I realized that the two microphones recorded completely different sounds from water hitting the rocks. And it actually sound like way too much stereo. So I had to blend it down a little bit, and then it was a little bit more listenable. That makes sense. : I can't think of one product that has that. George, can you think of any other product that has that? : It's one of those majorly missing features of almost every other standard stereo interface. Like if you look at a scarlet two I two, people try using a scarlet two I two all the time to do things like this. And then they get frustrated when one person's voice is in the left and the other one's in the right. And that's not what they need. What they needed was a mixer, but they're using interface and they just don't conceptually understand what the difference is. : That is a unique feature. That pan move someone to the left or right is a very unique feature to these sentence interfaces. And you don't see the input pan on any device. What you do see is the ganged stereo monitor pan on almost all devices. So two places where sentrance has been unique. The Instamano knob. I can't think of any interface that does that unless it has a full mixer. The other thing that's unique is technically the original mixer face is the only interface I know of that has a separate left right usb versus input play. : It's unique too. Absolutely. Speaker B: Yeah. And then that use case it was useful for, and it was designed for, is when you have a guitar in one end, your voice in the other end, and you might want to listen to a little bit of a background track. And that gives you a blend between the guitar and the voice in the headphones. It essentially affects the headphones. Right. So you can keep your levels where you want them with the two level knobs, but you can adjust your headphone mix with those two other knobs, but. : You could affect the blend. You could blend in more of your input than your output. But when you played back, your mix was different because it wasn't really. Yes. Speaker B: This was for monitoring only. : Totally. So what then is interesting also is the original mixer face. And I'm not sure if this one has, but the original mixer face at least also uniquely had a mono switch for the output. So you could at least hear the two centered. You weren't recording them centered, but it has a mono switch. And is that in the portcaster or does that switch go away? Speaker B: It's still everywhere. And I have to say it confuses a lot of people, including famous youtubers. We won't name names, but essentially this thing was designed to be so flexible, it's useful. We possibly overloaded it for an average user. So I have customers who are tweaks and they love it. Because they can use in so many different ways. But for example, the mono stereo monitor switch allows you to print in stereo, but listen in mono. Right. Whereas the mono stereo blend knob, you're listening to whatever you're recording. So if you're blending with the mono stereo knob, you're actually printing mono, which is an important distinction. : And again, I can't think of any interfaces to do this. Most interfaces don't give you these types of choices. They're just features you can't find on a focus. Right. Or something like that. Speaker B: That's more for videography, things like that. So there's also a third. There's a line output on the podcaster. And then that allows you to record to essentially three places. So you can use the podcaster to send your audio to three separate recorders, one being the internal SD card recorder, one being the USB whatever it is that you're recording to or streaming live to. Right. And then the third one, the line out goes out to the camera. So that's for video applications. And then you can record audio onto the camera as well. : Can I give you a total feature for that? Speaker B: Go. : Okay, so you're recording stereo audio onto the internal card of the Portcaster? Speaker B: In this case, yes. : And then you had the line output stereo technically going into the camera. Right. So put a timecode generator in this thing, record three channels of Timecode onto the Portcaster and then drop one channel of Timecode. Speaker B: It's been brought up so far we've dealt with people who do shorter things and they just jam sync it. Where? I don't know what the current thinking, current wisdom is, but about 20 minutes of content recorded, it doesn't yet drift yet far enough. : But it's a lot of work still. It's still a lot of work to go find it. Like timecode just lines it up for you. You don't have to go. Speaker B: Yeah. After about an hour, it starts becoming a problem. But so far, I don't think we've dealt with anybody who's using these for very long periods of time. It's a voiceover artist who's recording for 30 seconds or if it's a youtuber. Then again, it's not a long thing. Speaker A: On the soapbox, Michael, on the bottom of the soapbox, and I think I've figured this out, there are three link switches for each of the processing, for the gate, for the compressor, and for the Deesser. Can you tell us what they do? Speaker B: We wanted SoBox to be extendable to multichannel situations. So, for example, for stereo or for multichannel recording. What you can do is you can actually line up several of these soapboxes and you can have one of them control the others in a linked situation. So in a stereo program, that's important because you don't want the two channel, the left and right channel to pump differently. You want them to sort of be in sync. And what those switches do is they allow you to choose. There are two jacks there called smart link. One is the link in and the other one is link out. So you can actually control one soapbox with another soapbox, and one became the master and the other one became the non master. : But that's not like the slave of a compressor that's just controlling the same knob. It's setting the two knobs at the same position. Speaker A: Right. : There's still two parallel monocompressors. Speaker B: No, if you switch the switch to the remote, then the knob becomes useless on that unit that is in the remote mode. Essentially, it will only listen to what the other unit tells it to do. : Right. And what is the other unit telling it? Is it telling it where to set exactly so they. Speaker B: Because it's a control signal, it's like. : Working on a VCA kind of thing. Speaker B: You can have one soapbox control another soapbox. : Is the VCA controlling the gain reduction or is it controlling the position of that knob? Speaker B: The position of the knob controls the VCA unless you flip the switch, put it in remote, and then a remote signal controls the VCA. And the knob essentially sits there doing nothing. You can rotate the knob on the slave unit and it would not do anything because the slave unit would be listening to the signal from the master unit. Speaker A: Okay, so how are we linking those together? : Is that the USB connection, the little 8th inch connectors. Speaker B: Trrs. We're having an arc here. TRrs comes back. : Is it trrs or just trs? Speaker B: Trrs. : Are you using the whole TRRs cable for the VCA? Speaker B: Yes, because there's three things that we can control. Gate, compressor, and Deesser. Speaker A: There you go. : All three are on one link. You don't need three links. One wire, one wire gets you linked. Speaker A: That's the smart link. : That's cool. Speaker A: Yeah, right. : So much innovation in these things. It's great, man. : Wow. Speaker A: There you go. Very cool. : That's part one of our chat with Michael Goodman from centrance, talking about the English Channel. Next episode, we have Michael back to talk about the Passport Vo, the collaboration between this podcast and centrance. Catch you next time. : Well, that was fun. Speaker C: Is it over the pro audio suite with thanks to Triboof and austrian audio recorded using source Connect, edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Robbo. Got your own audio issues? Just ask robo.com tech support from George the tech don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say g'day. Drop us a note at our websiteprodiosuite.com.   #centranceTalks #VoiceoverTech #PodcastingGear #ProfessionalAudio #VoiceoverArtists #AudioInnovation #PodcastProduction #EnglishChannelReview #PodcastersLife #AudioTechnology #TriboothDiscount #PodcastTalk #PodcastGearReview #AudioEngineering #TechInnovation #centanceInnovation #VoiceRecording #PodcastSetup #AudioQuality #ProfessionalVoiceover #AudioTalk #MicPreamp #PodcastersCommunity #TRRSConnection #ProAudioSuite #PodcastersUnite #GearReview #AudioTalkShow

We went off on such a tangent this week I figured what better way to come up with a description than to let AI do it, so after feeding it the transcript this is what it came up with.. In this episode of the Pro Audio Suite, the hosts dive into a wide-ranging discussion covering the impact of AI on voiceover work, the intricacies of voice licensing in the digital age, and the challenges of maintaining digital identity and content integrity. From concerns about AI-generated voices and the protection of voice actors' rights to the potential theft of intellectual property and the evolving landscape of digital transactions, the hosts explore the multifaceted aspects of the audio industry and beyond. As the conversation takes unexpected turns, they touch on topics like the future of cash, online security, and the unique dynamics of holiday seasons in different parts of the world. Buckle up for a lively and insightful conversation that meanders through various aspects of the modern audio landscape and its broader implications. A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth... https://tribooth.com/ And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear.. https://austrian.audio/ We have launched a Patreon page in the hopes of being able to pay someone to help us get the show to more people and in turn help them with the same info we're sharing with you. If you aren't familiar with Patreon, it's an easy way for those interested in our show to get exclusive content and updates before anyone else, along with a whole bunch of other "perks" just by contributing as little as $1 per month. Find out more here..   https://www.patreon.com/proaudiosuite     George has created a page strictly for Pro Audio Suite listeners, so check it out for the latest discounts and offers for TPAS listeners. https://georgethe.tech/tpas If you haven't filled out our survey on what you'd like to hear on the show, you can do it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZWT5BTD Join our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/proaudiopodcast And the FB Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/357898255543203 For everything else (including joining our mailing list for exclusive previews and other goodies), check out our website https://www.theproaudiosuite.com/ “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.” Hunter S Thompson Transcript Speaker A: Y'all ready be history, get started welcome.,Speaker B: Hi. Hi.,Speaker C: Y'all ready be history, get started welcome.,Speaker B: Hi. Hi. Hello, everyone to the pro audio suite.,: These guys are professional. They're motivated with tech. To the Vo stars, George Wittam, founder of Source elements Robert Marshall, international audio engineer Darren Robbo Robertson and global voice Andrew Peters. Thanks to Triboo, austrian audio making passion heard source elements George the tech wisdom and Robo and AP's international demo. To find out more about us, check Thepro audiosuite.,Speaker B: Com line up learner. Here we go.,Speaker C: And of course, don't forget the code. Trip a p two hundred and that will get you two hundred dollars off your tribooth. Now, we're going to talk microphones today because there's one thing I don't think we've ever discussed, or not in depth anyway. Is RF on a shotgun mic? Now I'm assuming rf is radio frequency, but for anybody like me, what does it actually really mean? And should it be something that we consider when we're buying a shotgun mic?,Speaker A: You mean the fact that the microphone uses what they call an RF technology? Is that what you're referring? Sure. I'm sure Robert would know more about the details without me having to google it. I read about RF microphones for a few times and I think one of the side effects of a mic being RF technology, which by the way, has nothing to do with transmitting a radio signal, right. It's the ability for the microphone to reject noise. I don't know if I've ever heard of a four hundred and sixteen, for example, which is using this RF technology as having an issue. Picking up radio frequency noise. If anybody else has heard of that, if you've had a mic, a four hundred and sixteen picking up RFI, let me know. But one of the advantages of that technology is it's very highly immune to humidity.,Speaker C: Yeah, that's what I heard.,Speaker A: And why that exactly is, is definitely beyond my pay grade.,Speaker C: Isn't it something to do with the way inside the microphone? Each part talks to itself, like talks to each other. It uses like a radio frequency inside the microphone to communicate with itself. That's my vague recollection of what it actually is.,Speaker A: That is certainly plausible. I just wish I was more understanding of the technology.,: So we're talking about it rejecting radio frequencies, is that what you're saying? Like a shielded cable would reject?,Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's what it does. And if anyone's listening, we should do what everybody else does on their YouTube things. Leave us a comment in the comments section.,Speaker A: Can I do story time and read it to you?,Speaker C: Yes, do story time. Oh, I'm sitting comfortably, George.,: But read it in your best bedtime story voice, George.,Speaker A: Okay, yeah, well it would have to be in a german accent.,Speaker C: I'm not going to do that.,Speaker A: A bedtime german accent?,: No, that's scary.,Speaker C: That's really scary actually.,Speaker A: But there is a whole white paper from Senheiser and it's written by Manfred Hibbing and it's Sennheiser's professor. MkH condenser microphone sorry everybody, I'm sorry, but basically what it says is that high rf frequency solves a problem. So when the replacement of electronic valves by transistors commenced at the end of the fifty s, this change was also under consideration for condenser microphones. Reduced size, low supply voltages and lower power consumption were regarded as great benefits as well as being able to use simpler microphone cables. However, there was a basic problem. Direct replacement of the valve by a transistor was not possible due to the mismatch between the high impedance of the condenser capsule and the low input impedance of the transistor. Hence, for optimal matching, the capsule impedance needed to be drastically reduced. And then they go on to explain the impedance of capsules, et cetera, et cetera. So down to the next paragraph. How does RF microphone technology actually work? The principle is simple. After all that.,Speaker C: Yeah, sure it is.,Speaker A: Sound waves deflect the diaphragm of the condenser capsule and change the capacitance between the diaphragm and the nearby back electrode, or backplate. Contrary to the more common low frequency AF condenser method, the capacitance variations are not converted directly into audio signals, but modulate a high frequency radio frequency signal generated by an oscillator inside the microphone. This signal is then immediately demodulated inside the microphone, thus recreating the audio signal, but with a very low source impedance that is well suited for driving a transistor amplifier. Thusly, an RF condenser microphone is basically comprised of a transmitter and a receiver that are directly wired together. The RF signal is therefore kept inside the microphone only the audio signal is supplied to its output just like all other microphones. So yeah, what you were saying was pretty much usual for me.,Speaker C: What happened?,Speaker A: He picked it up through osmosis somewhere along the way.,Speaker C: That's right.,: Can I just say, Robert would make that a lot.,Speaker C: Yes.,Speaker A: Yeah, sure. The thing with humidity, and here's a little paragraph about this, there is no other important benefit of the RF principle for practical use, the low electrical impedance of the capsule provides outstanding immunity against detrimental effects due to humidity, because even then, the leak resistance is very much larger than the capsule impedance. Thus, Mkh microphones, which I understand, all of those, all Mkh mics are RF mics. They're well suited for outdoor use. So this is why mkh mics, no matter whether they are the mkh four one five, forty one six, and I'm paraphrasing here, or any of the mkh stuff like the mkh forty. There's the eight thousand series, right? They have the eighty third. Eighty, twenty, eighty, thirty, eighty, forty, fifty, eighty, sixty. They have a whole new line. All of them are using this technology. And the reason for why it still persists to this day is it's excellent outside and thereby it's also excellent in a sweaty, hot, muggy voiceover booth.,Speaker C: If it's four x three x six. Yes, indeed.,Speaker A: Especially if it's four x three x six. Absolutely.,: Yeah.,Speaker C: Talk about that outdoors, though, because this was something else where I got stuck in the rabbit hole that I mentioned before we started recording. Then there was a discussion about using shotgun mics inside. Now, this is basically for drama and stuff like that. So a boom op using a mic where they wouldn't use a shotgun inside, they would use a pencil. Small diaphragm, pencil condenser.,Speaker A: Yeah.,Speaker C: Now, if that's the case, if you're a field audio guy, why would you not use a pencil condenser as a voiceover person inside?,Speaker A: I don't know. I did have a pair, and I still do have a pair of pencil condensers, the classic octava mics that are so popular. And I used to use them to try to do field recordings. And I didn't know that much about mics at the time. And I would get the dreaded, we sometimes call it motorboating. It was like this.,: Yeah.,Speaker A: Fluttering sound. And I didn't know why it was happening. I just knew it would happen. And it would always happen if I was outdoors and sometimes I was like, in a really humid environment and it would get really bad. And I was like, oh, no, the mic's bad. And then I'd bring the mic home and I'd pull it out of the box later and would be perfectly fine.,: Yeah.,Speaker A: So because with af microphones or audio frequency condensers, because they store a charge on a high impedance capsule, it's easy for that charge to find a way and leak across the insulation by riding on water molecules which cause those motorboat or crackling effects. So I don't know. I mean, I think it's just another added benefit of an RF mic is that you're just never going to have that problem. But Neumann, large diaphragm condenser mics where you have two diaphragms extremely close to each other, even if it's a cardioid, there's still two. There's the diaphragm in the front that takes the sound wave and then there's one on the back that picks up the signal, creating the changes in capacitance, blah, blah, blah. And those are so close together that water molecules actually transmit the electricity.,: Yeah.,Speaker C: It's amazing.,Speaker A: And create the static.,: Yeah.,Speaker C: Do you know anybody who does use any pencil Mic for doing voiceover in their. I do.,Speaker A: I know people that use the eighty series or the eight thousand series, but those are MKh mics. So I believe all the eight thousand series Mkh mics are also rf.,Speaker C: Is that the eighty fifty?,Speaker A: Is that like the eighty fifty? The eighty twenty, eighty thirty are tiny little stubby capsules. I mean, they're mini because I guess they have the most condensed electronics and boy, are they expensive.,: Yes.,Speaker A: This is a stereo set. So I'm looking at two thousand eight hundred for a stereo set.,Speaker C: Don't look at the chefs then.,Speaker A: Yeah, I know. Chef takes to another level, right?,Speaker C: Yes.,Speaker A: But yeah, the MKH forty is going to be about one thousand four hundred us. So if somebody's comparing mics and they look at this minuscule, laughably small mic and then they think, why would I ever use that over a four hundred and sixteen? Well, that's because it doesn't have the negative effects of a shotgun microphone.,: Yeah.,Speaker A: Doesn't have any of the negatives. It doesn't have the negatives in terms of off axis phase problems.,: Yes.,Speaker A: You get a way more accurate pattern as you go off axis. Right. So that's one reason it's certainly very nice to work with, because it's so small.,: Yeah.,Speaker A: So it's never going to get in the way. But they're going to be extremely pop sensitive. Right. Because the capsule is right there at the grille. It's right in the front. Like any pencil mic. They work great on voice, but they pop like a mofo. Yeah, they pop really bad. So you have to have good mic technique and maybe a good pop screen. But they are quite an upgrade. Some really have found them to be quite an upgrade. Like an eighty forty from a forty one six.,Speaker C: Yeah.,Speaker A: I would go with the eighty fifty because that's a super cardioid. That would be my choice if I was going this direction.,Speaker C: Yeah, it's interesting. It's funny with shotguns and we were talking about this also before we jumped on because the road kit I set my daughter up with for her travels, I gave her the NTG three and we were just doing some testing a few hours ago just to make sure.,Speaker A: That is an RF mic too.,Speaker C: I believe it is an RF mic, but also it's quite bottom end.,Speaker A: It's eqed very differently. It is a very different tone from.,Speaker C: The forty one six, which I think for location is perfect because the further you get away from the source, the sound source, the thinner the audio gets. But if they've got that sort of hype bottom end, it actually keeps some of that in there in the sound, which is great for that kind of work. But it also sounds really good on a female voice. I mean, she sounds great on that ntG three. But when I put it up in front of me, I had one for a while, mud central. It just didn't work.,Speaker A: Muddy?,Speaker C: Oh yeah, it wasn't good.,Speaker A: You lose articulation. It doesn't have a crisp attack. It's very, yeah. There's another mic that's really popular because of its price point and that's the Cinco d two. Have you heard of that one?,Speaker C: No.,Speaker A: Very cheap shotgun mic. And of course it looks a lot like a forty one six. Of course, same color, same shape, same size, same everything. So of course it gets sold all over the Amazons and stuff as a cheap forty one six. But it sounds nothing at all like a forty one six. Nothing at all. Yeah, it's a very flat mic. Very flat, very dull. So when somebody sends me that sample, I know immediately I'm going to have to help the top end. And when I do that, up comes the noise. And that's the other problem with small diaphragm mics. Making a small diaphragm pencil or shotgun mic sound as low noise as a large diaphragm mic is no small feat. No, it's very difficult to do. So. That's another problem. You're never going to get a small capsule mic to be as quiet from a self noise perspective as you will a large diaphragm mic, even a cheaper diaphragm. Well, let's look at the rode nt one four or so db self noise. You're never ever going to find a small diaphragm mic with that kind of a measurement.,: Yeah.,Speaker A: What's funny is I'm reading the specs right now from the Senheiser mkh. Eighty fifty. They don't even quote the self noise.,Speaker C: Interesting.,Speaker A: Which to me is a way of saying it ain't so great, but it doesn't matter. This is a location mic. You're going to use it outside so it doesn't need to be that quiet.,: Yeah.,Speaker A: But still, it's a one thousand four hundred dollars mic and they don't quote the spec. So I find that kind of fascinating.,Speaker C: Yeah, but if you're buying a shotgun, and I know we've banged on about this before, but I still reckon the best value, the best bang for buck in any shotgun mic is the NTG five from road.,Speaker A: Yeah, it sounds once they got over there they had some growing pains with that. They did. We definitely had a few people with some issues and it seems that that has been sorted because I haven't heard of any of those kind of complaints of noise or whatever for well over a year now. It's been more than a year or two.,: I was a victim of one of those. The first one they sent me I had problems with, but sent it back and got a brand new one and haven't had any problems with it since. Full credit to road all.,Speaker A: I never ever had a problem replacing a mic.,: Yeah, and full credit to road. All I sent back was the actual mic and I got a whole new, whole new kit when they sent me back the new one. Typical of road.,Speaker A: Really.,Speaker C: So you got a nice little shock mount for your forty one sixes?,: Yeah, I've now got two of their shock mounts, which is kind of nice.,Speaker A: Well those are cool, man. If you were to go buy those pistol grip shock mounts with the rycoat style Lyre mount and everything, those are going to be one hundred dollars plus easily.,Speaker C: Easily.,Speaker A: And then the windscreen and everything else. I mean it's like one hundred and fifty dollars kit plus the mic.,: Yeah.,: And I do like it. It's standard fare in my room here. That or the austrian audio one or.,Speaker C: The other of the two. Yeah.,Speaker A: Mine pretty much lives permanently in my kit for going on the road and traveling. I have a pelican hard case and the ten TG five lives in there. It's just always there, ready to go.,: Yeah. Well, you know what I need to figure out now, thinking about that is cutting the foam in the road kit for my english channel so that the NTG five fits in there and then I've got it all in one case that's what I need to figure out.,Speaker A: Oh yeah. It seemed that there was enough space in there to squeeze in a shotgun mic.,: Absolutely. Just pick up the bag and away you go.,Speaker A: That'd be a sick kit, wouldn't it? Oh, man.,Speaker C: Fantastic.,Speaker A: I did actually dig around and I went on the recording hacks website, which is a great database of microphones recordinghacks. Com. And while it's missing mics here and there for sure, it does have pretty much all the Neumans and Sennheisers and the bigger brands and stuff. And I found the eighty fifty and they actually do list a self noise rating of thirteen DBA weighted. So the Sennheiser four hundred and sixteen is like sixteen, I believe. Okay, so they managed to shave three db of the self noise.,Speaker C: I think the NTG three is about the same. About twelve or thirteen from memory.,Speaker A: Yeah. That's good. I mean, it's going to be hard to find a lower value than that. I haven't seen. I mean, maybe Sheps has something quieter. Possibly. I haven't looked, but. S-C-H-O-E-P-P-S. Is that how you spell.,: Am I thinking of the engineer or the. Is it double P?,Speaker A: Well, yeah, it's confusing because you have the mic called sheps.,: Yes.,Speaker A: And you have the engineer, and I.,: Can'T remember whether it's double P for the engineer or double P for the mic. One of them has two.,Speaker A: I guess I kez guessed it right. It's S-C-H-O-E-P-S. So the CMC five, which is one of the quintessential chefs shotgun mics, is. It's got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Different capsule options.,: Wow.,Speaker C: Bloody hell.,: Wow.,Speaker A: They have this huge array of capsules that thread onto the body depending on what you're doing. So let's look at a cardioid. Let's look at a super cardioid, the mk forty one. It does not list a noise spec.,: Right?,Speaker A: There's no noise spec listed anywhere. There.,Speaker C: Kind of old school, isn't. It's like the old cmv microphones from Neumann back in the. Would have been thirty s. Forty s where you got the bottle. And instead of having a switch to go from cardioid figure eight to omni or whatever, you unscrewed the capsule and put new capsule on the top.,Speaker A: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Well, actually my mkhs. Sorry, my octavus. Same deal. I have three capsules per mic, but that whole kit with two mics and all the capsules costs less than one of these capsules.,Speaker C: Yes.,Speaker A: You start realizing the difference in cost is pretty stark. I mean, they said the capsules are anywhere from eight hundred dollars to one thousand four hundred dollars for one capsule.,: Yeah.,Speaker C: I do like the idea of the ships. The shotgun, that's blue. I mean if you had that in the booth and as soon as you see that color, you go, oh, okay, somebody's serious.,: Yeah.,Speaker A: Have you ever seen their v four u model? It has a blue bottle and then the grille has this very cool deco style grille. It's very cool looking. Look it up sometime for you. And it's a neat looking mic and it has a quirky thing. It's that the capsule has a slightly hinged head so you can tilt the capsule forward and back a little bit. Like ten degrees, twenty degrees.,Speaker C: Oh God, that looks good.,Speaker A: But it's a cool looking mic.,Speaker C: That is very tasty. Yeah, don't Google Robbie, you'll get blow your machine up.,: Well, I'm doing it on my iPad, but it's saying there's some problem with the website and I can't get on there. So I don't know what's going on.,Speaker A: V four U is three thousand dollars retail. And then it has a pretty flat response curve. I mean it has a small presence rise at four k, which is typical, but it's only like two or to three db rise. So it's pretty flat.,Speaker C: That is insane.,Speaker A: I remember trying it at one of the nams or whatever and being like, wow, that's a cool sounding mic.,Speaker C: It looks really neat, very tasty.,Speaker A: Oh, that's how much it costs.,Speaker C: Okay. Yeah, I might get one in the next lifetime. Yeah, I was in Tokyo and I saw a dunhill store and I went in there and they had these linen bucket hats and caps and stuff. I thought, wow, they're really cool. And I was looking at the price and tried on the bucket hat and it's like, yeah, I'll get that. So I said, yeah, I'll take this one. I said, actually, I might even get the cap as well. And the guy's looking at me going, no, you don't need the cap as well. Just take this hat. That's all you need. I'm like really doing yourself out of a sale here.,: Okay, whatever.,Speaker C: So I bought the thing and I'm walking back to the hotel and then I'm doing the calculation in my head and thinking I just got a bargain of thirty five dollars. I sort of went, hang on a minute. I got the digital point in the wrong spot.,Speaker A: I just paid three off of zero.,Speaker C: Three hundred and fifty bucks for a bucket hat?,: Yeah, right.,Speaker C: Dear, oh dear, oh dear. Anyway, yeah, well, that was fun.,Speaker B: Is it over?,: The pro audio suite with thanks to tribut and austrian audio recorded using source Connect, edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Robo. Got your own audio issues? Just askrobo. Com tech support from George the tech don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say g'day. Drop us a note at our websiteproudiosuite. Com.