Dear Home Recording members,
Total amateur here, worrying about things not being "perfect". Thanks in advance for your attention.
I am breaking into recording acoustic piano for the first time and I am desperate to avoid early mistakes. I have a pair of NT55s currently just within the top of my upright piano. Positioning, sound quality and actual progress aside, I am noticing something strange. Both microphones are set to -10dB and high pass filter off, same gain on the mic pre, everything zeroed on Reaper, and yet, one microphone appears to be picking up more noise than the other. No matter how I swap the mics about, swap the capsules, move the switches around, the same mic is noisy. These were sold as a matched pair, as much as that is worth, so I am assuming that they should respond the same at a basic level.
When I increase the gain in the quiet mic to the point where they are both picking up the same background noise, the noisy one also appears to have a much longer decay on the levels visible. If that is poor phrasing, the level stays high after the sound is gone for half a second, whereas the quiet mic level drops the instant the sound is gone. The following is a low res screen capture of what the meters get up to when theres noise. The preamp and all other levels are equal for the mics.
streamable.com/fed9t3
I am at a loss. Is this even important? Is one of the microphones faulty? Should I agonise over something else? Any and all advice about what to do next is appreciated.
Total amateur here, worrying about things not being "perfect". Thanks in advance for your attention.
I am breaking into recording acoustic piano for the first time and I am desperate to avoid early mistakes. I have a pair of NT55s currently just within the top of my upright piano. Positioning, sound quality and actual progress aside, I am noticing something strange. Both microphones are set to -10dB and high pass filter off, same gain on the mic pre, everything zeroed on Reaper, and yet, one microphone appears to be picking up more noise than the other. No matter how I swap the mics about, swap the capsules, move the switches around, the same mic is noisy. These were sold as a matched pair, as much as that is worth, so I am assuming that they should respond the same at a basic level.
When I increase the gain in the quiet mic to the point where they are both picking up the same background noise, the noisy one also appears to have a much longer decay on the levels visible. If that is poor phrasing, the level stays high after the sound is gone for half a second, whereas the quiet mic level drops the instant the sound is gone. The following is a low res screen capture of what the meters get up to when theres noise. The preamp and all other levels are equal for the mics.
streamable.com/fed9t3
I am at a loss. Is this even important? Is one of the microphones faulty? Should I agonise over something else? Any and all advice about what to do next is appreciated.