This is a subject close to my heart... I have a lot of tools at my disposal to "mangle" audio both here at work and also at home. Soundtrack Pro is one of my favorite weapons of mass destruction, and I have lots of plug ins to modify stuff with.
Also, I have a lot of hardware compressor/limiter/preamp/leveler/phase rotator/exciters too to create audio mayhem with. Having said all that, I will tell you what I do for recording audio... I simply record my mic (almost exclusively the Yamaha CM500'ds electret capsule) completely flat through my MicroHam MicroKeyer 2's sound card into the N1MM computer DVK via the MicroHam record facility. Then, I apply all compression, equalization and gating within the K3 using its built in processing tools. That's it. Nothing else. Nada. Bupkis. Some of you have heard me on the air. I believe my "canned" sound is identical (discounting voice box fatigue) to my recorded sound. I cannot tell them apart off air. It has taken me a little while to get used to the tools available in K3 to have what I consider competitive contest audio punch. The "digitalness" of the radio is very different from my venerable TS850S that, with lots of outboard junk, provided me with 11 years worth of crackly punch that sliced and diced through piles like the Ginsu knife it was. You just have to keep in mind the "Spinal Tap" rule and not get carried away. A little goes a long way. Mic technique and placement is important. Equalization is important. Room acoustics is important. Voice technique is important. One thing I would love to have in the K3 audio chain is a fast attack medium decay "AGC/Leveler" of some sort, pre-RF compression/clipper, post gate. This would make the rig perfect from the audio perspective and with careful, judicious use, would help those with "thin" voices or poor mic placement, however, you could get into serious trouble if too much AGC was applied in a noisy environment, so maybe we should leave well enough alone... Never forget that we are transmitting into an extremely noisy medium where transmitted audio dynamic range and wideband frequency response is your enemy. If this was broadcast FM or TV, our priorities would be very different. But its not, its "communications" audio. The point is to be clearly understood and get the message through, not to sound like Orson Wells or Ernie Anastos. I dont know about time processing either. KT0NY mentions he time compressed his clips from 3 seconds to 2.6 seconds. 4 tenths of a second total shortening. Does that really buy you a lot? Yes, I can do the math, but does it REALLY buy you *THAT* much to risk inteligibility? Im in K9YC and W3FPR's corner on this discussion. And if anybody wants to make me a good offer on 6 rack units of Behringer, Symetrix, Aphex and London processing gear that the K3's processor/gate has obsoleted, let me know. -Lu-W4LT- K3 # 3192 --------------------------- Message: 26 Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2011 10:39:04 -0400 From: Don Wilhelm <w3...@embarqmail.com> Subject: Re: [Elecraft] optimizing recorded audio To: Tony Estep <estept...@gmail.com> Cc: elecraft@mailman.qth.net Message-ID: <4db19308.7010...@embarqmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed When doing audio processing, always keep a copy of the original file until you are done. Each step in the process does create some loss of quality. That means, the more you mess with it, there is potential for the result to end up bad. Keep notes on what is being done - how much leveling, how much tempo change, etc. Then after your experimentation is complete, start again with the original file and apply the full changes - the result will be better than the result obtained by incremental changes during your experimentation. I would also recommend using only the K3 to apply compression. You already have compression applied to the mic input, and that same compression will be added to the computer audio stream. In general, compressing an already compressed file will produce bad results. I have done only a moderate amount of audio editing work, so I consider the words of those experts (like Jim Brown) who have done a lot of it as sage guidance for me. 73, Don W3FPR ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
