April 28th 2020, Day Twenty-Eight
Pre-Amp longer version:
The back side of my desk upstairs is where I do my audio recordings. The desk is split by my 22 inch monitor. On the front side is where I write. When I switch to the audio side I sit in my voice-over chair. It is a completely different feel, I have my Super 55 Shure desk microphone, a digital recorder, a pair of Sony Studio headphones, and a voice activated script reader on a tablet.
The XLR cable from the mic plugs into my single channel (mono) recorder. This recorder can just plug into the end of a handheld mic and there is no cable at all. You might have seen these when you watch a news reporter doing a field interview. It’s just a little rectangular box, some record, and some transmit, mine just records. The reason I like it for single person recording is because it doesn’t have all of the dials, meters, and inputs that my multichannel recorder has, it just has a tiny LCD screen and four buttons, with a headphone jack. The only drawback to this recorder is that it doesn’t have enough gain (volume) for a dynamic microphone. Because of this you have to turn it up all the way, and that still isn’t high enough, so the recording has to be adjusted in post production, and it causes a lot of noise in the recording. You can remove it digitally, but it requires a lot of tweaking, and it never sounds as good as one that was recorded with a good pre-amp. With a properly recorded voice-over sometimes you don’t have to process it at all, you just edit your speech (cut out the bad stuff) and the voice-over part is done.
To make a long story short, you have your microphone, you plug this little pre-amp into the bottom, then you plug the small recorder into the pre-amp and you are ready to record. No cables, it is a one piece unit. Boda-boom, boda-bang!
I used the new pre-amp in my voice-over chair this afternoon and couldn’t believe the difference it came out as good as my much larger multichannel recorder and was way less trouble than setting up the other recorder. This means less time to record, great quality, and it is totally portable. Yeah, baby!