Hot answers tagged monitoring
8
What you need is a simple mixer. It will function independently of your computers, and (unlike a y-cable) you'll have a master volume control.
If you only have two stereo sources, something small like this Behringer Xenyx 502 or a similar one from any other company will do nicely. Pick the brand based on what's most important to you (tone, features, ...
7
I'm struggling trying to answer this in a way that would enhance what you've got already. Because really, you've got a pretty good representation of "everyman's speaker" there with the Creative set you have already.
So I'm going to take a different approach here and, instead of recommending something to buy, I'm going to recommend some techniques I use to ...
5
You can often make your own passive "mixer" similar to a Y-cable. You just need to put isolation resistors in series with each output before tying them together, or the two outputs will see each other as short circuits and destroy each other. The resistor method is not as good as a real mixer, but it can work in some circumstances.
Why Not Wye?
5
USB was designed as a general purpose bus. Hence, there will always be some latency. The more devices you have connected to the bus, the more problems you will run into. I suppose the only purpose a USB large diaphragm mic would have is for one or two mics during a pod cast. I would never use such a mic in my studio.
That being said, if you plan on adding ...
5
When you record-enable your track you want to click on the Monitor button on the channel to enable software monitoring. Then you'll be able to hear the track, with any realtime plugins, while playing. This introduces some latency though and you may find it's unacceptably high to play well using this approach.
Here's a great YouTube video that talks about ...
4
In-ear phones would probably only be okay as long as they are the kind that completely seal and fit inside the ear canal—ones that are specifically made for monitoring.
Personally, if I wear that kind too long it'll start to hurt my ears, so I'd go with circumaural headphones, but that's me. So maybe it comes down to personal preference and what you find ...
4
Honestly, my answer to this question, in which you infer that you plan to rely primarily on audio, is "do it any other way than you are planning".
Here's why; I work for an alarm monitoring company. In our line of work, where every signal from an alarm panel could be snot-nosed employees playing around or a matter of life and death, it's video, not audio, ...
3
You'll want to try Room EQ Wizard.
Pretty full featured, as per the website:
REW is a Java application for measuring room acoustics and analysing
room and loudspeaker responses. It includes tools for generating test
signals; measuring SPL and impedance; measuring frequency and impulse
responses; generating phase, group delay and spectral decay ...
3
Audio monitoring is application dependent.
For example, when using Ableton Live all you have to do is to set up a channel using EXT.IN (or whatever input your using) and change the the monitoring from AUTO to ON.
Most application will have you change the monitoring of a specific channel to on - some of them you'll just need to 'arm' the track, which ...
3
It is best to use regular microphones and a small mixer, which then hooks to a USB or other sound interface to your computer.
The reason is that USB microphones are simply regular microphones with built-in sound cards. Even if you set them to sample at 44.1kHz for example, they will drift apart over time, as their clock rates are completely independent.
...
2
To do quick monitoring, finding disturbing signals and getting a general idea of the reverberation in the hall, I gladly use my Sennheiser HD-25, but basically any well closing pair of headphones will do.
If you need to check the amount of recorded reverb, just listening in the hall while the musicians are playing is not enough, you need to record a bit, ...
2
The ART SLA4 should meet your needs. Not the cheapest amp around, but it fits in one rack unit and is of high quality.
If that is too expensive for you, just plug in whatever amps you like that aren't. You don't need to run all four channels in one amp.
2
If you're going to "pink" your room you need more than just measurement software. Unless one of your generic microphones is a measurement mic you are fighting an uphill battle. All mics have different frequency responses and coincidentally a mic that has reasonably flat response (measurement mics) actually sound worse to us (for recording) than mics that ...
2
KeithS is correct on most likely going with a "condenser" microphone.. As he mentioned it may pick up additional "noise" and such as this type microphone is designed to basically pickup any sounds with-in a pretty wide field... But, they have gotten pretty good and "setup correctly" (for your situation) can be perfect for discerning "noise" from the audio ...
2
If I understand correctly, the preamp is turned up to a gain where it is clipping. This means your problem is not with the mic, because it is giving the UA 101 a good signal to work with. The UA 101 is a USB interface, so its input into the DAW you're using is controlled by the software. Check the software settings, because the problem might be that you ...
2
Forget about headphone impedances; as you assume they're primarily an indicator for the loudness, but you can't conclude anything about the sound from them. In particular, the higher the headphone impedance the lower the influence on the sound.
Actually, the sound of any headphones is mainly governed by their mechanical construction. I personally have never ...
2
you are in the correct track: a small mixer would do the trick. Basically you have the pfl button that would get the specific channel(s)/souce(s) selected to your headhones jack (monitors) without modifying at all your master (and viceversa). Another option would be something like the Mackie Big Knob, made specifically for what you want, but in this case you ...
2
I would consider the most important "rule" of monitor placement to be the geometry. That is...
You should have an equilateral triangle made up of the two monitors and the listening position.
You should consider the tweeters to be the points from which you measure, as the higher frequencies are the most directional.
As an example, for my home theater, I ...
2
I'm more of a live audio guy than recording and tend to use in-ears for my monitoring, but my understanding of the idea behind isolation pads is to absorb the vibration of the speaker and/or the surface and prevent it from impacting the sound produced by the driver. Something like a computer monitor stand is going to be more worried about providing a hard, ...
1
From a Home Security/Automation point of view the ELK M1 (or NESS M1) allows you to place their microphones throughout your home and connect them back to the M1 Alarm Panel in which you can listen into via the internet or by dialing over the phone.
Not only can you listen in you can also enable two-way communication in which you can listen in but also ...
1
You need something called a telephone hybrid. It's a hardware box you connect the telephone lines through and has the option to "hijack" the line so you can record the audio from the (real) phone. This takes care of feed-back problems and so forth, and you connect it to the mixer with ordinary cables.
They come in many variants and for different regions, ...
1
Don't try to do this with your mixer, the callers will get bad echos of themselves and have a hard time talking.
Instead, either use Skype's built in conferencing combined with SkypeOut to connect to POTS numbers. Or use another conference bridge service and PC based VoIP client. It should be easy to record the conference once you've brought it in to your ...
1
"to be heard above the music" – above what music? If it's some fully-mastered mixdown that you're replaying at 0dB, then this is no surprise: such a track has lots and lots of compression on it, making it way louder than a clean microphone track can ever possibly be. You may feel that it's the microphone that's too quiet, but in fact "everything else is too ...
1
The problem with a Y adapter is that the audio signal is fed into both devices -and- the speakers, which attenuates the signal, and could potentially cause damage -- if both sources are active, they add together.
To see the attenuation effect, plug in the Y cable, turn on a (quiet) source of audio, then unplug one device. Louder, eh? That difference is ...
1
There are two kinds of headphones to consider - noise isolation and noise cancelling.
In-ear headphones that "seal" and many standard headphones are noise isolation. This simply means that they're in the way of most other sounds, and physically block them. Noise isolation headphones should be sufficient, unless the external noise is very loud. However, I ...
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