After 2 years of podcasting and experimenting with settings and spending weeks and weeks tweaking audio I was never able to get the sound quality I wanted. I have always been seeking that deep, punchy, talk radio sound quality and it always seemed out. I’ve spent tons of money on equipment that people promised would give me that sound with no results.
FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY, late last night after 7 hours of being in the studio tweaking audio I have FINALLY figured it out! I needed to reverse the polarity, no I’m serious. Sounds like something a crazy scientist would only say. Yesterday after reading around the internet for 2 hours I came across something called Phase Reverse. Now the description of phase reverse was in regards to an effect in Cubase. What this effect does essentially, is flip the sound wave on the timeline. I did this to a test recording and it looked more like the FM talk radio clip I was comparing my levels to. So I looked deeper into this phase reverse and I found this little quote on some webpage:”lines and mics that are wired backwards, or mics that are ‘out of phase’ due to their positioning”. After reading this a light bulb went off in my head.
Phase reverse happens when the left and your right channel of your cable somehow gets mixed up in your chain. The entire time of having the studio I was using 1/4 inch cables to connect my mixer to my preamp, and my preamp to the compressor. Some would say left channel or right channel and some were just numbered. I was also using just whatever cables I had laying around. What happened was I was plugging stereo cables into mono inputs and mono outputs. I think thats where things went wrong.
Finally I unplugged all the mics except one and used the XLR cables to wire everything together. Right away I could hear the difference. I had that deep, rich talk radio sound and it wasn’t noisy at all. I used to always get a buzzing in my headphones whenever I had the noise gate turned off.
There is still a little more tweaking to do but I am definitely going to be getting a buncha XLR cables today. Thursdays show should sound amazing! LISTEN! <a href=”http://wrecklessmediaradio.com”>http://wrecklessmediaradio.com</a>