thebishopgame, 1 year ago

@reay What interface are you using? It’s entirely possible the preamp just doesn’t have enough juice, though 58s shouldn’t be that hard to drive. Also possible something’s up with the mic.

reay, 1 year ago

@thebishopgame Thanks for the feedback (Ha! Audio humour…)

I’m using a UR12 interface. I know a guy who’s in a professional band and I’m hoping he’ll have a mic on hand I can try out to see if that’s it.

thebishopgame, 1 year ago

@reay Yeah, something’s up. That should drive a 58 just fine. Either the preamp or the mic isn’t working like it should.

reay, 1 year ago

@thebishopgame Interesting. Any chance it’s the computer? I’ll get the program on another laptop and try it there to check that possibility.

A lot of this will be sorted out piecemeal as I swap out one piece of the kit for another. The guy at the music store said he tested the (used) mic and it worked fine, but the interface was a demo model and I don’t know if he tried that.

It’s all under warranty, I just want to narrow down the culprit(s) ASAP.

Thanks for the help.

thebishopgame, 1 year ago

@reay No, unless it’s something like the display is weird. Some programs have configurable scales for waveform display, not sure about Audacity. Is there a level meter where you can see what your peaks are actually hitting?

reay, 1 year ago

@thebishopgame The levels are on there, for sure, but I didn’t make note of the highest they went other than checking for noise floor (which wasn’t even registering on the metres despite being in an echo-y space with a furnace vent blowing loudly beside me).

I did take pics of my screen showing my waveform (top) compared to one in an Audacity tutorial (bottom, sorry for crappy focus). Both are at 100% zoom. There’s just that much difference in recording amplitude.

thebishopgame, 1 year ago

@reay Yeah, that definitely seems low.

reay, 1 year ago

@thebishopgame Right? And that’s with the gain cranked basically all the way up, which generally just shouldn’t be the case.

I do also have to be right up on the mic to get even that, though I understand the SM-58 is kinda like that.

I’ll poke at a few more things tomorrow and try it on another computer and see if I can get any better results.

thebishopgame, 1 year ago

@reay Given how durable 58s are, I expect it’s probably not the mic. One other thing to check: the cable.

reay, 1 year ago

@thebishopgame Ok, so update: Realized I hadn’t installed the driver for the UR12. Straight-forward, seemed to take it ok, all good.

And now it’s recording as more sensitive than it had been, though still oddly low.

With the gain at zero, there’s literally no levels registering on the input. You can hear it on the playback, but very faintly.

Gain cranked half way, I was peaking at around -40dB.

Gain at max, peaking at -12. That was too much, even with headphones pretty low.

reay, 1 year ago

@thebishopgame So yeah, definitely more sensitive with the driver installed, but I’m still having to put the gain up around half way to get it into a decent playback volume.

And for what it’s worth, even with gain maxed out and the volume too high, the wave pattern amplitude on the visual is still really small compared to what I’ve seen in every tutorial video, with them just talking casually. 🤔