See also
Podcast upgrades¶
Finally my extended podcast equipment has arrived. It has been a month since I’ve taken the first previous one and though the audio quality is OK-ish, there is still room for improvement.
I basically didn’t like the lack of control over the audio at all. And I’m not talking about the built-in filters and adjustments, but more like that I could just have one external microphone (if I’d have had one that time). But with two people you’re already outnumbering the number of microphones.
The basic requirement of being a bit more flexible wasn’t in that setup. Jeez, it was just a simple recorder. With an outstanding performance, I have to admit.
But whenever you leave the quiet rooms of an apartment, you’re pretty much screwed if you want just to record the voices and not too much of the environmental noise. So I needed to upgrade a bit. The requirement was basically two microphones of whatever type into a single mini-jack (like on a laptop or something), so that I can record everything to disk.
Yesterday a bit more flexible setup has arrived.
The lavaliere microphones I’m gonna use outside in more noisy environments. The first tests showed great results. You actually tend to forget that you have them on you when you’re talking and the quality is much better than with the directed microphone I’ve used before.
The t.bone is a kind of compromise to see what’s possible. They aren’t that expensive and they get a lot of the environment, but that’s more interesting when you’re actually in space where you can unfold you setup and you don’t need to have everything in the smallest possible space.
The Behringer Mixer seems to be great as well. It’s a bit tricky and basically a monster when it comes to output a strong signal. There are so many tweaks and twists and buttons you can turn, that I definitely have to practice a bit before I can say that I have half of it under control.
My laptop doesn’t seem to be able to cope with it yet. I mostly get clipping noises and can’t understand a single word. As soon as I turn the input down, it’s getting very quite. I’m surely lacking some knowledge here.
So currently I’m re-using the single line-in on the previous audio device to record everything. That seems to work pretty stable and will be sufficient until I catched up on the Linux side. That’s a bit frustrating actually.
The size of the mixer is at the border of being transportable. It’s surely nothing you want to carry around while recording, but it’s not too big for not putting it on a table and stuffing it into a bag.
Everything together fits into a small luggage bag of the size of hand-luggage on a flight. Not my ideal solution, but better than having it in a backpack or something, since it still should be transportable.