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First attempt... what do you think of my sound floor?

 
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Roar-duh
Contributor III


Joined: 04 Apr 2015
Posts: 81
Location: Chicago-ish

PostPosted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 7:23 pm    Post subject: First attempt... what do you think of my sound floor? Reply with quote

So I'm just getting everything moved in and set up with my new booth, and I want to make sure I'm measuring everything right.

MXL 990 mic with a Behringer Q502USB mixer / preamp / USB interface. Levels set for me at -6 to -3, no filters, no EQ, no compression. The first one is with the booth's fan on low, the second is with the fan off. What do you think?




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Frank F
Fat, Old, and Sassy


Joined: 10 Nov 2004
Posts: 4421
Location: Park City, Utah

PostPosted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 8:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You are gonna laugh... I promise. I know you spent a lot of time and probably some money getting the fancy equipment to view and make the graph. But, what really lets me know what your "floor" is like is to have a high quality audio file or two.

I can show you two microphone freq. analysis and will defy you to tell me which microphone sounds better than the other.

Frank F
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richvoice
Been Here Awhile


Joined: 12 Aug 2008
Posts: 217
Location: Tucson, AZ

PostPosted: Sat Apr 18, 2015 8:06 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I think your noise floor is lower when the fan is off. Smile
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Philip Banks
Je Ne Sais Quoi


Joined: 20 Jun 2005
Posts: 11046
Location: Portgordon, Scotland

PostPosted: Sat Apr 18, 2015 10:26 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

11.4 to 17 across all frequencies is a median figure when re-scaled to European standards.
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Bish
3.5 kHz


Joined: 22 Nov 2009
Posts: 3738
Location: Lost in the cultural wasteland of Long Island

PostPosted: Sat Apr 18, 2015 11:23 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I think they are numbers. Numbers can be good for tracking down issues (whatever you are, you rogue 1833Hz whistle, I will hunt you and kill you with my special set of skills!)... but they can also be a distraction. It's noisier with the fan on... yep, that's to be expected. I'm also concerned with any figures that are showing better than -90dB with anything over 1Kz... and (I'm not trying to be funny here)... your chain (or my chain) is just not that quiet if everything is set to record at nominal levels!

What do your ears tell you?
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Bish a.k.a. Bish
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I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls.
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Roar-duh
Contributor III


Joined: 04 Apr 2015
Posts: 81
Location: Chicago-ish

PostPosted: Sat Apr 18, 2015 6:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks guys... I know I'm trying to look at something very subjective through an objective lens of numbers, and that's kinda tricky. My ears tell me that it's pretty freaking quiet with the fan off, but I may have to resort to a high pass filter if I use the fan. Cracking the door with the fan off is a possible solution, but leaves a lot of variables out of my control.
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vkuehn
DC


Joined: 24 Apr 2013
Posts: 688
Location: Vernon now calls Wisconsin home

PostPosted: Sun Apr 26, 2015 3:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Roar-duh.... for most of us, this subject can become a never-ending search.

We get better at what we do, and we attract customers who then demand that we do even better.

The equipment available to us gets better for the dollar so we set our goals to do better and better in all aspects of sound.... with a lot of emphasis on the noise floor issue. Somewhere between two and three years ago I was beginning to "feel my oats" and think I had conquered noise. Then I received this response to an audition for a book: "I like your read. I think you and I can do business together. But you have to do something about that noise." That was followed by a very well written description of the noise.

Last week I pulled out an audition from back then and played it just for grins. I didn't get a grin so much as I got embarrassment. What a lousy sound. So looking forward three years... when I come back and review one of my recordings today (which are pretty good... thank you Rolls Eyes ) will I then be saying: I can't believe I was happy with THAT CRAP!!!! ?

Let me offer you a crash-course in room noise standards. I may be reaching just a bit beyond my skills level, but drink it in and then take on the goal of proving me wrong and knowing the subject better than I do.

When we record, we measure every thing from THE TOP. Wide open, maximum loud, is ZERO level. We set out gain so we record at minus 3, minus 6, minus 9.... or lower. Whatever you are comfortable with. (We couldn't do that back in the days of tubes and tapes. We needed to run as near to ZERO as possible lest the equipment noise ruin our day.

But when you talk with studio designers (the buildings, not the equipment) and try to understand where they are coming from, they work from ZERO being the BOTTOM. The threshold of human hearing ability. They deal in SPLs.... (they measure with a Sound Pressure Level meter, and the pros that design performance centers and churches will spend more on a handful of exotic meters that we spend on an entire studio!

We who narrate books tend to maybe speak a little softer than guys and gals doing modern-day radio-production style reads.... but you can take a magic marker and write on the wall that the human voice hits the microphone somewhere in the neighborhood of (plus) 73dBa. Your loudness and your distance from the mic will change that some.

You will work your buns off and be very creative to get your room noise (as measured by the SPL meter) down to the mid to low (PLUS) 20s dBA. So now we have our first brick wall. A 73 dBA program sound hovering over a 20 dBA room noise means when you achieve a ratio better than 53 dB, you have achieved hero status. Go buy yourself a beer.

Here is a test for you to try... the equipment needed is low cost. You need a mic plug that doesn't have a cable and connection to plug into a mic. You want a "loading resister" inside the plug. Set your gain control at the position you normally use for recording. With no mic, you have no room noise. But as you analyze the recording, you will see something that indeed is NOISE. Internal audio chain circuit noise. We usually want a better mic and a better audio chain because we think it will make us sound better. Unfortunately, some of us will NEVER sound any better, but the better equipment will usually reduce our built-in equipment noise. I gritted my teeth some time back, spent the money, and found my so-called room noise dropped 18dB. No the room noise did not drop. The equipment generated noise dropped that much.

I'm slow to write this response because I waiting till I could rummage through the junk box and come up with an old T-R-S quarter inch plug and solder a loading resistor in there. No connecting wires to anything. Just a dummy load. Since my new rig has insert jacks between the preamps and the Analog-to-Digital USB converter, I can now tell you how much noise just the converter alone adds to what we call "room tone" and exactly how much noise my pre-amps add to "room tone". Then there is the microphone. If you take a mic and put it in that perfect room up in Minnesota where they claim to have room noise of MINUS 9... supposedly certified to be the quietest place on earth, your microphone sitting in that perfectly quiet room will generate it's own electrical noise. The best mics (from the noise point of view) are as low as may 3 or 4 PLUS dBA, A lot of mics generate the equivalent of 10 to 14 dBA, and some of the very best European mics that we all lust after may have as much as 16 to 19 dBA internal noise.

So let's end this maybe boring explanation with this formula. If I speak with a PLUS 73 dBA voice level delivered to the mic, and the mic itself generates 14 or 15 dBA, then the best I can ever hope for is a ratio of about -58 below program content. Now if my room has a tiny bit of noise, and my pre amp has a tiny bit of noise, and my digital converter has a tiny bit of noise, then somewhere between 50 and 60 borders on perfection.

To do better, you are going to need to learn the fine art of NOISE REDUCTION via your software. And that is where I got my chops busted over two years ago for that noisy reading. It wasn't just noisy.... it had ham-handed blood-and-guts artifacts from bad noise reduction.

Welcome to our club, Roar-duh. Except for the very gifted, we spend years and years fighting this battle.
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Frank F
Fat, Old, and Sassy


Joined: 10 Nov 2004
Posts: 4421
Location: Park City, Utah

PostPosted: Sun Apr 26, 2015 4:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

vkuehn, you win!

I do not believe anyone could explain it better.

My BS lights blare when I see too clean of a noise floor. I believe the only place I have seen a noise floor extremely low was in an anechoic chamber with a high end reference mic. And that was still noisy.

Roar, your ears are the best thing possible to determine a noise floor. Graphs mean very little in the real world.

FF
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Be thankful for the bad things in life. They opened your eyes to the good things you weren't paying attention to before. email: thevoice@usa.com
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vkuehn
DC


Joined: 24 Apr 2013
Posts: 688
Location: Vernon now calls Wisconsin home

PostPosted: Sun Apr 26, 2015 5:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Some of this theory stuff really came home to bite me you-know-where just over a year ago. Some one was so kind as to send me a great mic. It has low output. I had been experimenting with evaluating each of these little sources of noise in the studio and when I put the new mic in place, I could not observe changes resulting from turning devices off-and-on. The natural output of this mic was so low that when I turned up the gain to compensate, all those internal noises down in the pre-amps and the USB converter I was using rose up and smothered the room noise. I couldn't tell which was which. I could turn devices off and on and could not measure change because device noise overpowered it.

Cloud-Lifter to the rescue! Life was good again.
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