[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.