Some Newbie questions.

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Innovations

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I am an experienced computer programmer wanting to set up a home studio principally for spoken voice recording (voiceovers for IVR program promts, phone system customization, training materials, etc.) Rebuilding my house is not an option, and I am looking for a good bang-for-the buck.

I have read the articles about using a sound card for recording and as a longtime PC geek opening (or even building) PCs is no problem. My concern is with noise. Not signal-to-noise kind of noise but rather loud fan noise on my desktop system. Because of the need to have the keyboard, moniitor, mouse, etc there the noisy computer cannot be far away. Since obviously many of you are recording on computers how do you handle the fan noise issue?

This has lead me to some other thoughts. One is to use my laptop computer (compaq presario 1800T) but I am concerned that the onboard sound system will not give good results.

Another would be to buy a personal minidisk recorder like a Sony N1, record elsewhere, and then transfer the recorded sounds to the system. Although it gives some other cute benefits I am concerned about the extra steps and adding an extra decoding/encoding to the process (since Sony refuses to allow direct digital upload of minidiscs to PCs).

Another would be to buy a hard disk recorder or maybe something cheaper like the Tascam Pocket Studio to record eslewhere from the computers, since these can do a direct digital transfer of the recording. Thise are a much more expensive solution.
 
Many Options

There are many options.
But I believe the most flexible / expandible route I'd to go with your PC.
I may get trashed here for saying this, but getting started your computer audio card is probably sufficient, particularly for spoken word. I personally hate them, they are low on headroom and have terribly small, hard to reach interface plugs that require a myriad of adapters to use, but it is a starting place.

You will obviously need a microphone and a mic preamp. I know many multi-media people simply use a headset mic and the mic input on the audio card but I think in the long run you will have much better product with a good microphone (either dynamic like a Shure SM7 or an EV RE-20 or possibly a decent condensor mic that flatters your voice) and a mic preamp (a small mixer or a DMP-3 or ?)

Your biggest enemy will actually be early reflections. I do a lot of voiceover work.In the beginning all my stuff had a small room sound due to the small vocal booth I was using was not dead enough. You can't get that sound out of the mix no matter what processing you use. You will get good results putting up some absorbtive baffles aound your mic position, or record in your closet with a lot of clothes hanging up(not exactly easy to do by yourself).

If you are not going to be doing any multitracking I would stickwith a good stereo editor like Sound Forge. It gives you a very powerful combo of recording and editing , as well as denoising / compression / CD burning utilities.

If your PC is really that noisey you can creat a sound absorber-type box / shield to suck up most of the noise. A pvc pipe frame with a heavy blanket thrown over it between your mic and PC will do wonders.
 
if you wanna use your lap top, you could get an inexpensive usb audio interface- thatll work with any of your machines- best bet though if your usin pc is to put it in a different room, potential pain in the ass if youre doin this on your own, you gotta hit record and run to the next room- the accustics will be an issue as tmix said.
 
kremitmusic said:
if you wanna use your lap top, you could get an inexpensive usb audio interface- thatll work with any of your machines- best bet though if your usin pc is to put it in a different room, potential pain in the ass if youre doin this on your own, you gotta hit record and run to the next room- the accustics will be an issue as tmix said.
Click to expand...
Are you speaking of something like the Sound Blaster Extigy? Or is there something else that you would recommend?

Getting an extigy, my laptop, a small inexpensive used mixer (I see a lot of old tascam portastudios for sale on ebay) and a good microphone and then setting up the whole thing in my walk-in closet while I am using it. Although not quite as portable as a pocketstudio it still woudl be reasonably sized if I wanted to, say, record my church choir or something.
 
Some standard VO mics are the EV RE20 and the Sennheiser 421. A Shure SM58 would work if you want something cheaper. If you use a dynamic mic like those then you don't have to worry so much about ambient noise. A dedicated single channel preamp like the Audio Buddy will usually give you a cleaner signal path then some cheap mixer. Any of the M-audio Delta cards will give you much better quality then a soundblaster for just a little more money. Stay away from old portastudios.

You could get some acoustic foam or insulation like Owens Corning 703 and setup a closet as a VO booth. Then you can just hit record and go in there and read your script. Make sure you give a 'slate' before each take saying what you are recording. 'Introduction take 1", etc. Then after you record a bunch of takes you can listen back and write down the takes that you want to use and the time they occur. Then copy the good ones to new sound files and use those for your phone system.

The options you mentioned for isolating the sound are all good ones and it just depends on what works best for you. Since your final output is going to a phone system I wouldn't worry too much about stellar quality.
 
Thanks, your input is helping me greatly.

Tex, although the final use in some cases will be the phone I am guessing on needing better quality than that for two reasons. The first reason is that even for the phone systems the deliverable to the customer is going to be on a data CD and the customer is going to want to review and approve it using their PC and/or stereo. The second thing is that the training materials voiceovers may well be used on multimedia centers in corporate training rooms, many of which have excellent sound.

Kermit, that is getting to be the direction that I am starting to lean toward from what everybody is saying. A standalone unit that uses my laptop hard drive for storage. I can then edit it on any of my computers as they are all networked.

In addition to the UA-5 I am looking at some others: What are your thoughts on these:

Ediron UA-20...cheaper but does not have XLR mic jacks (important?) also only samples at 44.1khz (important?)

Ediron UA-200...Extra inputs and lots of tweaing options (but would I be doing most of this tweaking in software anyhow?)

M-Audio Duo...This seems so similar to the UA-5 that I cannot tell if there are any significant differences (are there?)

M-Audio Mobile Pre...cheaper and otherwise looks good but only samples at 48 mhz/16 bit (how important?). Claims that being powered from the usb port is a feature (but it is going to drain my laptop battery so fast (particularly if it is providing 48v phantom power to the mics too) that I am going to need to be plugged in anyway?)

Digidesign M-Box...seems pricey but has a nice bunch of bundled software and an attractive design.
 
Computer Noise Reduction Tips

Hey, now I get to post to your thread! Here are some tips for reducing the sound of a computer....

Heat is the cause of 95% of noise meaning more heat needs more fans which make more noise. So, with that in mind let's reduce the moving parts which are causing the noise -- fans. Here are a couple ways to get rid of fans.

* Get an "older" video card. Suprisingly the video card is the 2nd hottest item in your case. The nVidia chipsets run very hot and most newer generation cards even come with their own fans. Besides, why would you need 3d acceleration and tri-linear mipmapping using SoundForge? You can get very reasonable cards for under $20 (ebay, etc) that don't produce the heat and are more than sufficient for displaying what you would need it to display.

* Find the biggest heat sink you can find for your CPU. Depending on the chip you can get away from the CPU fan entirely (CPU fans often make the most noise because they spin faster to move the air), BUT be sure you test the system heat/performance under load using a utility that will tell you the temp of the CPU... let me know and I can recommend a couple. This is trial and error, and I don't recommend using this method with anything over 2 gHz. Preferably you want a heatsink with a copper core and aluminum fins/spreaders. You can mount it PERMANENTLY using a conductive adhesive (also conducts electricity so use sparingly) such as Arctic Silver. A good place to look for big heatsinks is in an old (broken) stereo reciever, they have big ones that a hacksaw can get out easily. If you have any fans on the northbridge controller (big chip on the motherboard usually in the middle) I would remove it and look for a heat sink to adhere to it like the CPU method above as those are noisy suckers too.

* If you are into case "modding" (www.modthebox.com) you can create a lot of custom airflow solutions to get rid of ALL of the fans -- leaving only the hard drive! For example you can use a hole saw (fine tooth) to cut a couple 3" holes in the bottom of the case assuming you have a tower case. Desktop's are very tricky and I don't recommend using a desktop case for a "quiet" workstation. Let heat rise naturally and if need be place one outflow fan on the top or one inflow on the bottom. I've seen crude solutions like cardboard airducting taped together that did the trick with pulling air through a CPU heatsink and out the power supply. Contrary to popular opinion and how risky you are, you can remove, or unplug even the power supply fan. It runs a little hotter for sure, and I don't recommend doing this unless you know what you are doing (risk of shock) and DO NOT go over 150 watts of juice in the case. (CPU is 35-50, hard drive 17-24 each, each cd drive is 15-20 when used so be careful) Most power supplies support up to 200-250 watts for your average mid-tower case.

* Use bigger fans or variable rate fans. The standard fan is 80mm and can get noisy, espescially with dust buildup. So, if you are into cutting sheet metal look into a larger (yet sometimes spins slower even with higher airflow) 120mm fan. Some fans can have a variable rate, meaning you can mount a knob on the front that slows down the fan (reducing noise considerably) manually.

* Another way to eliminate the resonation is to make sure the fan (especially power supply) doesn't point at a hard wall or corner in the room. Some people recommend acoustic treatments to the inside of the cases, but please bear in mind sometimes those treatments are insulative to heat too, which can give you fits and system instability. Also, be sure not to have a CD in the CDROM and silly stuff like that that could "spin up" during recording.

Above all, be sure to test your machine very carefully and if it starts to over heat shut it down and try something else. Its not worth frying your $200 P4 3Ghz over a little bit of noise.

So, here's an ideal case:
Strip out all the components (assuming you are competent enough to get them back together correctly), drill a 3" hole in the bottom and mount a fan blowing INBOUND (up) by your older video card, through your CPU heatsink, and let your powersupply blow it out. Also, place acoustic foam in the drive spacers that aren't being used and along the side of the case opposite the motherboard and reassemble. Pay attention to wires that are blocking the airflow and try to bundle them out of the way. If you wish to get really fancy you can find round IDE cables (ebay) which are very condusive to airflow. Then most importantly test the heck out of it.

These tips are for the serious nerd-bot-geek-trons such as myself which have done about everything with computers. Please dont attempt unless you are very competent in doing pc hardware mods.

S.
 
Thanks steve, actually when I was still considereing quieting my mini-tower systems rather than using the laptop for recording I was leaning in two other directions.

The first was the low tech solution of building a sound-dampening overcase.

The high tech solution was watercooling with the radiator/fan outside the room. Unfortunately watercooling power supplies is almost universally not recommended so you still have to find a solution for the power supply fan.
 
I think i'd go for the idea of the pvc-cage with a wool blanket over it. :) Cheap, and functional!

S.
 
Labor or money? You can modify a desktop as Steven suggests, or buy or build an isoraxx. The nice computer gets locked up in basically, a soundproofed footlocker.-Richie
 
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