Sound Quality - No Point of Reference!

[A1Qicks]

So I'm trying to get into VO work, and to that end, my dear old dad, who was a BBC Producer a long time ago, gifted me a Stagg MCO-5W.

Now, I've been recording some bits and pieces as practice for demos, and I keep noticing that there's this "after image" effect trailing speech on the spectrogram, sort of like a hiss that survives my noise reduction. It's easy enough to silence after I stop speaking, but I'm worried that:

a) it's audible during my words as a very faint hiss/overlap, and
b) it means that there's some damage to the mic (it's probably older than I am, in fairness).

But since I've never done this before, I have no point of reference for whether it's just normal and I'm overly worrying or not.

The "bleed" I'm referring to looks like this (at the far right),


while my audio generally looks like this:


Should I be worried about this? Is there anything I can do? I did wonder if it was my room - lots of hard surfaces - but I tried it under a thick duvet where there was a lot more sound treatment and it didn't look significantly different.

 

[bouldersoundguy]

After a few more posts or if a mod intervenes you'll be able to upload an audio file (mp3), which would help a lot.

 

[ecc83]

AFAICT 'Stagg' microphones are neither old nor particularly expensive? They seem to belong in that vast 'sink' of fair to middling Chinese LDCs?

The mic could be damp. Put it on a radiator or in an airing cupboard for a day.

Dave.

 

[jamesperrett]

That after image is probably room reverb. Do you have any treatment for your recording room? If not then you'll need to improvise by hanging duvets around you in order to give you a space that sounds dry. I'd also be very careful with noise reduction - don't do more than about 10dB in a single pass and don't overdo it. It is much better to have a recording that sounds natural but slightly noisy than one that is noise free but the speech sounds like you are talking in water.