If you’ve been following my blog or my podcast, you’d know that my studio and I have a love-hate relationship. After three years of buying equipment, tweaking, and having mental break-downs, I still am unable to achieve that, seemingly mythical, talk radio sound.
People ask me, “Brian, why do you care so much about getting that specific audio? Your show already sounds great. Why does it need to have that talk-radio sound?” I WANT that over-the-top, cheesy, over-compressed FM Broadcast quality for one simple reason. It sounds more professional among podcasts. I want to grab people’s attention right away. I want them to think to themselves, wow, this is no little show, there are sound engineers behind the scenes making all of this work.
There have been many many times I have turned on a podcast and because of the audio quality shut it right off because I couldn’t handle it. I also believe that there is some sort of hypnotic characteristic that talk radio sound puts you in that almost forces you to listen.
Anyways, down to the technical shit. I have been daisy chaining my audio for the longest time. Going from my mixer to my compressors and voice processors, then going to my interface. Well apparently that is a BIG BIG BIG NO NO. That amplifies the noise, like crazy!
The correct way to do this is to use your mic inserts on you mixer. The only problem with this is that you need a compressor channel per mic. Which can be expensive but is completely worth it if you are serious about having great sound.
I rewired the studio like this last night and i was amazed at the difference. It is still not perfect by any means but I think it is a step closer to achieving the sound that I want. I’ll keep this updated as I get closer to the sound I want.
Hey,
An audio enthusiast I see. Not sure if you use Winamp to stream at all, but there’s this plugin called Sound Solution. It is a multiband compressor/expander/gate/blah blah blah that’s pretty much emulates an Orban unit. Those are the big expensive processing units that you see in terrestrial radio. They process everything after all your vocal strips and what not. A friend of mine that ran a pirate station out of his house suggested it to me, and I’ve used it on my live show ever since. It’s amazing. and best of all, it’s FREE! If you have any other questions, or anything please feel free to hit me up. I put my e-mail in the little comment box thing a majigger.
Hope this is any sort of a help to you!
later
I know it’s been awhile since this post, but I found a way to get the radio broadcast sound-
Buy a guitar multi-FX pedal and run it through a Danelectro Surf and Turf compressor pedal. Turn the up noise reduction on the guitar pedal, and tweak the EQ a bit. I’ve chatted on Yahoo with this setup, and people commented that I sounded like I was on the radio. Sounds best recorded in mono. Works well for recording vocals, too- just add a touch of chorus effect, especially on screaming parts. The phaser effect is excellent for industrial rock if you use the TAP button.