[nickjj]

> A noise gate does not remove hiss or static, it simply reduces the volume of the signal when it gets below a certain level.

But the end result is with a configured noise gate the audio coming out will not appear to have as much hiss or room noise.

Check out the Youtube video I linked of his. It's super noticeable. With Sony MDR-V6 headphones, I hear a huge amount of hiss in his audio. To the point where it's distracting and drowns out his voice.

I'm not trying to pick on you or him, but if I go to your most recent Youtube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lf6dwipRYg, you can very much hear the same type of hiss within the first few seconds. I can't say for what what it is, but it sounds like your computer fan is spinning at 50% and it very much comes through. At about the 16:22 mark in the video, your fans appear to be spinning at 100% because it's much louder than before you started coding. It sounds like your computer is about to launch into space.

It looks like you have the same mic too.

I'm not saying the mic is bad, it's a really good mic. I just think the OP should have talked more about one of the biggest things that will kill a recording, especially when talking about "professional podcasting" and recommending high end gear.

For comparison, here's something I recorded with the AT2005 + DBX 286s acting as a noise gate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xd84hlIjkI

There's no software processing here either and my room is not treated with acoustic panels. In fact, my office is almost a worst case scenario. It's a wide open empty room with hardwood floors, angled ceilings and almost no furniture or rugs. I have super loud computer fans too and I'm right next to a window.

Even at maximum volume (unrealistically loud) there's pretty much no hiss or room noise. At least nothing I can hear with the same Sony MDR-V6 headphones.

I'm sure I could get similar results with the Shure mic too (using the DBX), but I'm happy with the AT2005. If I ever upgrade mics in the future it would be to a shotgun mic so it's out of frame.

[adamwathan]

What you're hearing in that video is a space heater running in my office — I don't put a ton of effort into making everything perfect for ad hoc live streams.

A proper screencast is probably the better thing to judge:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff_n_QClipQ

I'm sure you'll find something to nitpick over but I think it's pretty good for a programming tutorial recorded in my home office.

[nickjj]

> I'm sure you'll find something to nitpick over but I think it's pretty good for a programming tutorial recorded in my home office.

It's not nit picking.

The video you linked sounds much much better and really really good. Besides turning off your heater did you do any other processing with software afterwards? Such as using your video editor's noise cancellation filters or a proper DAW?

I'm just asking because taking a quick skim through your videos, your live stream videos all have some form of hiss but your shorter non-live screencasts do not which makes me think additional post-processing is being done on them.

But I think the OP's channel intro video and your live stream video is a good example of the importance of managing background noise, which isn't mentioned in the article at all but it's probably the most important thing to do and you can't just blindly throw money at the problem to fix it with no prior knowledge.

For a professional set up, it seems like a no brainer to want to filter out background and room noise before it even hits your computer. That's some of what the DBX does. This way the amount of effort it takes to do a live stream or screencast is the same when it comes to audio quality. You just turn it on and hit record, and you're done. It also works the same in OBS, your video recording tool of choice, zoom, hangouts, skype or any program that records your mic.

You mentioned being an audio engineer. Surely you know how important having a good audio source is, and how time consuming the editing process is when you need to fiddle with cleaning things up after the fact. Configuring all of this stuff to happen live is something I did after recording about 20 videos. Now 400+ videos later I couldn't imagine having to do post-processing on videos just to clean up audio.

[leviathant]

I listened to the first clip expecting it to be much worse than it ended up being. I'm listening on HD280pros, the headphones I keep at work, although I use Sony MDR-7506s when I'm in front of my audio gear.

The noise floor sounded more to me like bad gain staging than it sounds like fans and room noise. And I honestly think that the majority of people who watch that video aren't going to notice. I think you're too close to the process. I would venture that almost no one else in this thread would watch that video and call that an all-caps HUGE amount of noise.

A long time ago, I was mixing down some rough recordings of my band, and as I was putting everything together, I kept hearing the squeak of my cheap kick pedal every time I hit the bass drum. It was incessant, and it didn't help that I typically played at upwards of 160bpm. I tried EQ, notch filtering, all kinds of things available to me back in 2002 to try and get rid of that squeak without destroying the other things coming through the room mic, and I just couldn't do it, so I had to leave it in. No one else in the band could hear what I was talking about.

On my way home, I put in a CD by the band Cake that I'd had for a couple of years at this point, and I had heard probably a hundred times before. And even though it had never stood out to me at all before, all of the sudden the only thing I could hear on this professionally recorded album was THE SQUEAK OF THE KICK PEDAL. It was absolutely maddening.

I went on an electronic music binge for a couple of months after that, just to cleanse my palette.

[klodolph]

> I would venture that almost no one else in this thread would watch that video and call that an all-caps HUGE amount of noise.

I listened to the video and while I wouldn’t go all-caps, it’s way more noise that I like to listen to. So I downloaded the audio track and measured the RMS noise and signal levels, getting about a 30dB SNR. That’s a somewhat bad number, which matches my subjective experience.

A few years ago I converted some old audio cassettes with voice recordings of deceased family members to MP3. I heard all sorts of weird noises, but I spent a while getting rid of them with EQ and notch filters. I don’t know if anyone else in the family cared about the work I did cleaning up the audio, but I did.

Everyone has different standards, and it’s not quite fair to say that nobody in the audience cares about these things, just like it’s not quite fair to say that everyone in the audience cares.

[nickjj]

Thanks for doing the work to get the RMS noise and signal levels.

Yeah just casually comparing it to other random videos and podcasts, IMO it's really noticeable.

I was going to post a screenshot comparison of that between all 3 videos but it's probably not worth the effort. It's tricky to compare just by hearing because headphone quality plays a massive difference. On some headphones you can't hear anything but on others you hear all sorts of stuff.

Here's a funny story... I recorded a video course once, and even with a dynamic mic, RDX, etc. a crow was going BERSERK outside of my window, like you would think it was having a fight to the death with a pterodactyl.

Since the video came out pretty nice, I decided to keep it in as a joke since it didn't last too long, and during a spot where it was super loud I decided to throw up a 1 second picture of a crow.

Since the course has come out, I've had about 20 people e-mail me asking me why I showed a crow picture while talking about Docker. Turns out, they couldn't hear it even after I mentioned why I did it and requested to them to play it back a few times in a loop at max volume. Some headphones are just mechanically limited to not emit certain frequencies. Sadly, these are common frequencies in voice, instruments and random background noises that humans can hear.

A pair of MDRV6s can go a long ways. It's no wonder they are used in almost every recording studio.

[klodolph]

As I’m reading your comment I have the MDR-7506 (the V6 is discontinued, I think) right next to me.

They’re almost useless for mixing, but whenever I record something with a mic, I’ll put headphones on and crank up the mic gain. Does wonders for getting clean recordings.

[meheleventyone]

You’ve probably tried it but OBS has a reasonable software noise cancellation filter you can apply to audio sources.

[davzie]

A more directional and less sensitive mic like the NTG-2 may work better with some dampening on the walls or by adding a carpet. Additionally if you can't fix the room you can use a plugin to help reduce noise in dialog, something like Izotope RX7 will do a good job of doing this, but fixing the room should always be the first step.

I've used both the SM7B and the NTG-2 and I would record vocals all day with the SM7B if the room was in a good condition to do so or I was recording actual singing vocals. Otherwise I'd just use the NTG-2 which with it's highly directional nature is pretty good at removing a lot of other background noise.

[kwerk]

Does the NTG-2 work well in a desk setup with minimizing typing? I’m looking to find a better quality mic (blue yeti now) that does better at minimizing keystroke sound.

[nickjj]

The problem with the NTG-2 is it sounds reasonable enough when you have nothing being compared to it, but when you put it side by side with a decent dynamic microphone where you can listen to each one in an A / B test then it falls apart due to sounding super muddy and thin. It's something you can pick out in a blind test 100 out of 100 times if you have decent headphones and there's nothing you can do in post-processing to fix it.

Shotgun mics with a very good dynamic range and a pleasant tone tend to be pretty expensive. Usually in the $1,400+ range. Compared to something like the AT2005 which is a dynamic mic and is $80, but now it sits in front of your face.

This video has a pretty decent comparison of a high quality dynamic microphone to a $300 shotgun mic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiYEX-omlFk. It has both talking and typing tests. It's not the NTG-2 shotgun mic tho, it's the Deity-S. But it does serve as a decent base line comparison of how much worse a shotgun mic sounds unless you go up to the very high end.

[JshWright]

> But the end result is with a configured noise gate the audio coming out will not appear to have as much hiss or room noise.

> Check out the Youtube video I linked of his. It's super noticeable. With Sony MDR-V6 headphones, I hear a huge amount of hiss in his audio. To the point where it's distracting and drowns out his voice.

If the noise floor is high enough that it interferes with the actual signal, a gate is just going to make it more annoying to listen to (as you hear the noise cut in and out).

[devmunchies]

> a gate is just going to make it more annoying to listen to (as you hear the noise cut in and out)

my experience as well. its best to just use an EQ to dampen all high frequencies over a threshold so that its not distracting.

It would like this in the EQ: https://dt7v1i9vyp3mf.cloudfront.net/styles/news_large/s3/im...

I was a recording engineer at a TV studio before I got into programming. When we used gates it was very shallow, long compression so you couldn't notice abrupt changes.

[modernerd]

What USB interface do you use with the DBX 286?