 Hey, it's time for a special edition of Waste Over Body Shop Tech Talk and we're gonna do a interface shootout. We've been wanting to do this for a while, right George? Yeah, we really have. This is a big thing to put together because you got to first gather all these things and fortunately between Dan and I, we got a lot of interfaces we've gathered over the years. Dan has them spread out all over the floor so hopefully you see a picture of that later. There's a lot of gear here so we're ranging basically spanning a decade, right? Probably more than that. Some of the stuff I've had for a while. So if you want to see what they sound like, stay tuned. Coming up on VoiceOver Body Shop Tech Talk. From the outer reaches, they came bearing the knowledge of what it takes to properly record your VoiceOver audio. And together, from the center of the VO universe, they bring it to you. Now, George Widom, the engineer to the VO stars, a Virginia Tech grad with the skills to build, set up and maintain the professional VO studios of the biggest names in VO today. And you, Dan Leonard, the VoiceOver home studio master, a professional voice talent with the knowledge and experience to help you create a professional sounding home VO studio. And each week, they allow you into their world, making the complex, simple, debunking the myths of what it takes to create great sounding audio, answering your questions, showing you the latest and greatest in VO tech, and having a dandy time doing it. Welcome to VoiceOver Body Shop Tech Talk. VoiceOver Body Shop Tech Talk is brought to you by VoiceOverEssentials.com, home of Harlan Hogan signature products, source elements, remote studio connections for everyone, voiceactorwebsites.com, where your VO website isn't a pain in the butt. VOheroes.com, become a hero to your clients with award-winning VoiceOver training, J. Michael Collins demos when quality matters, and VoiceOver Extra, your daily resource for VO success. And now, live to drive from their super secret clubhouse and studio in Sherman Oaks, California, here are the guys. Well, hi there. I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Whidham. And this is VoiceOver Body Shop or VO BS. Tech Talk, Tech Talk, Special Edition. Well, all the Adobe After Effects graphics. Yeah, we'll throw those in there. Anyway, you know, we're off for a week, so we thought, what a great time to actually do an interface shootout, because we've got so many of these things. And I had most of them, but then George had a few more, so I had to get in the car, bring him some falafel, and drive all the way to Topanga Canyon, and make sure that we had enough interfaces to do. We've got like nine or 10 here, I think. Yeah, I'll just read down the wave files. That'll remind me what we have. Okay, that'll help. Starting at the top of the list, and this is in no particular order. The newest thing in this test for sure would be the Audient Evo 4. We have a Rode AI1, a Scarlet 2i2, Generation 2, and an Apogee 1, and I believe that is literally the first Gen 1, right? The old one. Yes, sounds great. The Audient ID 14, the Centrance Micport Pro 2, an Avid Mbox 3 mini, which used to be mine, and it's got to be 10 years old. The Micport Pro 1, or the original Gen, there's the Avid, a Focusrite Solo Gen 1, a Centrance Mixerface R4, an Apollo Twin Mark 1, that's the silver one, a Steinberg UR12, and actually, I think that's it, that rounds out the list. It's a heck of an array of stuff. So where do we start? You did this cool mix and match file, where we get to hear all of them intercut, and then we have samples of all of them. Where should we start? Well, I say we go through each one of them. But first, I think we need to tell people, if they're fairly new to watching our show, what it is that George and I do, which is, you know, we help people with their home voiceover studios, and the fact that so many people now need to have a home voiceover studio, because you can't go into the big professional studios, that everybody needs help. And boy, if we've been getting lots of interesting emails and requests and files from people, everybody's like, well, I just heard from this person that, you know, foam is just for decoration, that you should really use fiberglass. And it's like, oh, come on now. Said someone is FOS. And, you know, if you're going to ask us, we know the answers, because George and I have been doing this for a combined at least 30 years. So you're talking to people who have worked with the top people in the business. We have built literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of home voiceover studios. And this is what we do. We're not specialists in one studio our own, especially mine, since I'm actually a voice actor. And George works with all the top voice actors. And I work with all a lot of the top voice actors. And their audio should sound fabulous. But people get confused as to what they're supposed to use. And they get recommended tools that don't work well for them or are so, so complicated. They don't even know what's going on under the hood and why the audio doesn't sound the way they think it should. So, right, that's our job is to sort all that out. Right. So if people want to work with you, George, with you, George, with you, George, I'm the Judean, you're the, you're George. How do they work with you? You can head over to georgev.tech. That's the website where all my services are located. I've got on demand stuff where you can schedule one-on-one sessions. Or there's like a self-service list of options in there, like getting a sound check or having your, like a tutorial or a stack for your auditions. And Dan, you're also providing services on your website. Oh, yeah. We just go over to homevoiceoverstudio.com and check out what I do. And we're always offering some new stuff. There's lots of videos there. But I talk about what it is you need to do for a home studio and what you're using it for. And if you already have one built and you're recording and you want to hear what your audio, I mean, you know what it sounds like, but you may not really understand what it sounds like. I've got my specimen collection cup. And all you do is click on that, follow the instruction, send me a file. According to my instructions means follow the instructions. Follow the instructions. And for $25, I will give you a very thorough analysis of what is going on in your studio. If it sounds good, it is good. If it doesn't, we'll tell you why. And if you need a little bit more help, we can set that up with the consultation. But let's get into the meat of the matter here on voiceover, body shop, tech talk, interface, shoot out, shoot out, shoot out. Should have some fun with that. Anyway, let's start off with what's the first file you've got there? Well, yeah, just looking again at the list that I have in front of me. The first file I have is the EVO 4, which is one that we've both looked at. I did a review on this. And so this is our first close, really close listen to this thing to see what it sounds like. So Dan, also tell everybody about the parameters that you are following to make sure that this test was as accurate as we could do. So you're using what, Mike? Well, I'm using a Sennheiser 460. Well, better yet, why don't I just roll this video of the rules? Okay, here's the rules. I've got my 416, 30 degrees towards my chest, seven to eight inches away. I measured this is seven to eight inches. I'm going to be using different interfaces. I'm going to change them between each copy. And we'll read this standard script. Companies can no longer afford to be reactive. Across all industries, organizations rely on the uptime of their equipment to be as productive and reliable as possible. As systems age, predictive maintenance efforts need to be kept up to date. Today, new technologies have become available, allowing organizations to become more proactive than ever before in their reliability journeys. All right, let's take a listen to this EVO 4 sample. Companies can no longer afford to be reactive. Across all industries, organizations rely on the uptime of their equipment to be as productive and reliable as possible. As systems age, predictive maintenance efforts need to be kept up to date. Today, new technologies have become available, allowing organizations to become more proactive than ever before in their reliability journeys. Now, Dan, you have a second sample. Is there anything different between the two? No, no, no, that's just an alternative. So we'll go with that one. Okay. Your thoughts? Sounds good. And I think you're going to hear that a lot tonight. When you hear these things sort of in a vacuum or kind of alone, you know, when we're listening to them one after another soloed like this, you're going to find it very hard to differentiate between them as to what sounds better. So I'll play each of these samples down the line. And then what I might do is kind of more rapidly switch between them or just play your mix and match sample where you've intercut between a whole bunch of different interfaces and just made a cut of the way they all sound next to each other. So we'll do that a little later on. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, the EVO4, I liked it. You know, it's, you know, compared to the ID14, which we'll hear a little bit later, it's a totally different generation of an audio interface. And, you know, it's simple. I mean, here it is, you're actually listening to me on it right now because that's what I'm using to record. And it's, it's kind of cool. And it's, it's, it's a good clean sounding interface. Do you like the gain? Do you like the knob on it? Once you learn how it all works, yeah, it's kind of cool. And it also has a feature on it where you can set a level that's an automatic level setting, which I think is probably a really cool thing to have. You know what to do, set it at minus 10 peak or something? I'm not sure what it does. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So that's the EVO4. We'll jump on to the next thing in the list again, arbitrary order. This is the Rode AI1. So another pretty modern new design came out in the last couple of years. And let's see what that sounds like. Companies can no longer afford to be reactive. Across all industries, organizations rely on the uptime of their equipment to be as productive and reliable as possible. As systems age, predictive maintenance efforts need to be kept up to date. Today, new technologies have become available, allowing organizations to become more proactive than ever before in their reliability journeys. I think that one sounds great. Like a little bit better than the EVO4. I mean, it's subtle, but there's just something about the detail, like the top end detail. It's just something about it. It just seems a little bit crisper. But anyway, it sounds darn good. I'm 63 years old. I've listened to too much rock music, but to tell you the truth, they sounded pretty much the same to me. Yeah, they're really close. Yeah. I mean, is that going to be a big difference though? Is that something that is going to make the difference between you booking a job and not booking a job? Well, we'll play that mix and match later. And you're going to hear, when you intercut these together, how subtle it is. It's, again, playing them by themselves, it's harder to tell. Let's jump now back a little bit in generation to a Focusrite 2i2 Gen2. So this is a couple of years old. And let's see how this stacks up. And again, all of these look like their peak levels are pretty well matched. Oh, they are, trust me. We're in good shape there. Companies can no longer afford to be reactive. Across all industries, organizations rely on the uptime of their equipment to be as productive and reliable as possible. As systems age, predictive maintenance efforts need to be kept up to date. Today, new technologies have become available, allowing organizations to become more proactive than ever before in their reliability journeys. It sounds good. And if it sounds good, it is good. You're probably not going to hear us say this sounds bad tonight. I can guarantee it. We've already heard all these and there's not a bad one in the bunch. They're just shades of mauve. I like to go with it. Shades of mauve, yeah. Not a shade of chartreuse, but a shade of mauve. And so that was the Gen2 Scarlet. It's obviously one of the most common, most popular interfaces on the planet. Yeah. It really comes down to the fact that they all do essentially the same thing. They turn our analog audio from our microphones to the ones and zeros that our computers understand. It can turn into a graphic representation of a waveform and a spectrograph and all the other things that we do. So it's really important that people understand that is there a huge difference in these? Clearly, there's something and it probably has more to do with the preamps in them than in the actual analog to digital converters inside the units. You basically have two main components in these things doing the job, the preamp circuit and the converter, the analog, the digital chip. And honestly, there's only a couple of companies that make these parts. So in many cases, they may have exactly the same parts in terms of the preamp and or the chip and the converter. So anyway, take that. Now at the Apogee, they're kind of known for their converters. This is what they've always been known for. So let's listen to the Apogee One. This is the original Apogee One. This thing has got to be at least 10 years old, the little black one with the funky cable on it. And I've got a good story after we do this one. Companies can no longer afford to be reactive. Across all industries, organizations rely on the uptime of their equipment to be as productive and reliable as possible. As systems age, predictive maintenance efforts need to be kept up to date. Today, new technologies have become available, allowing organizations to become more proactive than ever before in their reliability journeys. It sounds great. I mean, it sounds as good as anything else that we've heard so far, if not the best. It has that same detail that I was talking about, that very top-end detail. That just sounds really, really clean and nice like the road. Here's the thing. The Apogee One, I have a love hate, great sound, but I don't like their driver software maestro panel thing. It's confusing. They have a funky breakout cable that's proprietary. I've never been a big fan of the design, but the sound quality speaks for itself. Yeah. The thing is, I didn't use the maestro on that. I was just plugged in and rolled. Yeah. You generally don't need it. The maestro thing is only for people that really got to hear themselves on their headphones. Right. And then you need that for that. But I've always found them to be a little fiddly. Nothing like an actual knob on the front of the unit to turn the gain up and down. Yeah. And it's a very functional knob too. Big silver knob. Push it in. It allows you to change inputs and things like that. About this had to have been probably 10 or 11 years ago, let's see, it was probably at the second voice conference at the Century City Plaza Hotel in probably 2010. So yeah, at least at least 10 years ago. I got to meet the president or vice president of Apogee, which is they're in Santa Monica. So they're like, I'll just go over there and check it out. And I was listening to it. I'm like, I have one of these and I really like it. He goes, do you use a preamp with it? And at the time, I had it, I have a, I still have it sitting on a shelf, a personas Eureka, which was great. The reason I used it is because it was a, it had a spittiff digital output that we could use as an optical input into a Mac. And he's like, what do you need that for? Go naked. And I'm like, excuse me? Let's go naked with it. It's like just go direct into the Apogee from your mic because. You saying trust the preamp. Trust the preamp in the Apogee because we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on research on these things and it'll sound great. And so, and I did one of the biggest projects I ever did using an Apogee one, which was an entire English translation of the Old Testament, which was about a six month operation and use that one. And it was flawless the whole way through. There was nothing. It was just dry as a bone and went right into that. And the Apogee one was great. You know, easy to settle level with it and easy to travel with. If you're one of those people that obsesses about moving about with your interface. And so it was a nice unit. It dates way back. I mean, I was looking online while you were talking about trying to figure out when it came out. The generation after that one, the next one, came out in 2009. Yeah. So that gives you this thing has been out for well over 10, maybe 12 plus years. So yeah, yeah. I mean, Tony, I've been saying this all along that we've pretty much nailed the interface AD converter sound quality problem already. But we did that a long time ago. So anything coming out is just variations on the theme with different branding, different prices, different knobs, but the sound quality is there. Yeah. And I'd still be using it, except I gave it away to somebody. And I went, well, I want to try this one. I was using two I twos and I'm using a bunch of other things. And, you know, of course, this is all proving that does it really matter? So anyway, but also the, the, the, the, the amount of gain that thing has without any hissing or any white noise or anything is just a really, really clean little preamp just a little tiny thing. Yeah, it does have a lot of gain. Yeah. Yeah. So now jumping back to audience, this is the ID 14, which has been a pretty well respected unit for quite some time. Let's see how this one sounds. Companies can no longer afford to be reactive across all industries. Organizations rely on the uptime of their equipment to be as productive and reliable as possible. As systems age, predictive maintenance efforts need to be kept up to date. Today, new technologies have become available, allowing organizations to become more proactive than ever before in their reliability journeys. It sounds good. It sounds good. We've had a lot of good sounding interfaces, but it doesn't sound great. Do you think? It's, it sounds, I mean, it doesn't have that something that the Apigee did on the top end. It's, it's, I guess it's, you want to say muddy, but it's not really money. It just doesn't quite have, I keep using this detail or articulate. It's basically the top, top end of the frequency range. There's just something not quite there. I think it'd be interesting to hear back, back against its suitor, the, or the newer suitor is maybe not the right word, but it's kind of the next gen audience thing, the EVO, EVO-4. Well, we've referred to EVO-4, so we don't, so let's listen to it right back to back. So here's the EVO-4. Companies can no longer afford to be reactive across all industries. Organizations rely on the uptime of their equipment to be as productive and reliable as possible. Now back to the ID 14. Companies can no longer afford to be reactive. That's interesting. The EVO-4 is a little darker, even then the ID 14. Yeah. So they're, they are, they definitely have a different sound from each other. Yeah. All right. So moving on. What's the next one on the hit parade? Yeah. The next one is says it is the MPPO-2. So that must be the mic port pro-2. Pro-2. We had an issue with this one, but let's, let's hear it. All right. Here we go. Companies can no longer afford to be reactive across all industries. Organizations rely on the uptime of their equipment to be as productive and reliable as possible. As systems age, predictive maintenance efforts need to be kept up to date. Today, new technologies have become available, allowing organizations to become more proactive than ever before in their reliability journeys. Good. Sounds really good. It was actually pretty crisp. Uh, crisp detail. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Yeah. It's about the issues you had while getting out, going out working. Well, I was, I was working with it and I started doing another take and it just crapped out on me. I was like, no, there's not, there's not, you know, we don't, we don't recognize it anymore. Stop it. You know, and I like it. I tried to get it to go again, try it. You know, I plugged it, plugged it back in and it stopped working on me. So that was, that was one of the initial takes. Cause I did a couple of takes. You know, the first takes we did, uh, I was sort of varying the read a little bit and it changed a lot of things. So I tried to do the read as consistently as possible, which is why it doesn't sound like, you know, you know, some really professional voice. It's as close to apples to apples to apples as you can get. Exactly. It's really consistent. Yeah. I did, did the battery die? Cause that's the quirk about that thing. It has a battery in it. It was plugged in. Okay. I had, I had it plugged in and then it just suddenly just lost content. We've seen that before. I mean, we were doing a, a, a mic shoot out at Woeville con a couple of years ago, using a, um, a mixer, a Behringer mixer. And it just died on us. I'm like, now what? So fortunately we had a backup, which is what we do. Let's jump to its much older brother sibling, the Sentron's mic port pro. Okay. Kind of was like the one that started it all in terms of ultra portable, high quality interfaces. These things are definitely way north of 10 years old now. Yeah. Uh, here we go. Companies can no longer afford to be reactive across all industries. Organizations rely on the uptime of their equipment to be as productive and reliable as possible. As systems age, predictive maintenance efforts need to be kept up to date. Today, new technologies have become available, allowing organizations to become more proactive than ever before in their reliability journeys. They're really similar sounding, right? I mean, they're pretty much identical. So anyway, Sentron's, you know, they said that they designed a new preamp and everything for it, but fortunately they didn't mess with the sonics. It sounds fantastic. Right. So if you like the extra flexibility of the mic port pro two, the extra features it has, the battery for plugging into an iPad, um, probably the way to go. I don't even know, are they still selling the mic port pro first? I don't, I do not, I do not know. Probably not, right? Probably not, right. Yeah. Yeah. Now, well good. I figured maybe it's time to go to the mixer face, since we're on the Sentron's products. We're on the Sentron's chain. Yeah, let's go to the mixer face. So the mixer face came out before the mic port pro two. It's kind of like the mic port pro doubled. It's like two of them at stereo. So let's take a listen to that one. Companies can no longer afford to be reactive. Across all industries, organizations rely on the uptime of their equipment to be as productive and reliable as possible. As systems age, predictive maintenance efforts need to be kept up to date. Today, new technologies have become available, allowing organizations to become more proactive than ever before in their reliability journeys. Essentially the same. Yeah. As you'd expect. Yeah. Actually to me, sounded a little bit more transparent. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I could see that. Yeah. Yeah, they're all, they all compare very, very favorably or similarly between all the Sentron's, which, you know, it's good. That's actually a good sign because that means that Michael Goodman, the designer of these, is listening to them and making sure that that sound quality carries on from product to product generation to generation. Absolutely. So now we're going to jump back in time. And we skipped over. We're going to go back to the Avid Mbox three mini. Okay. This thing has got to be 10 years old, at least. So this is kind of an older generation. Now granted, they had a couple different versions before this. This is the three. Here's the original. The original Mbox. Signed by. Signed by Melissa Disney. And the reason it's not in the test is because it's 32-bit and none of our computers can even support it. There's no functioning drivers that will work on it, so we couldn't test it. But anyway, here we go. The Mbox three. Companies can no longer afford to be reactive. Across all industries, organizations rely on the uptime of their equipment to be as productive and reliable as possible. As systems age, predictive maintenance efforts need to be kept up to date. Today, new technologies have become available, allowing organizations to become more proactive than ever before in their reliability journeys. No complaints there. Sounds fantastic. Sounds, sounds, sounds, sounds really good. Sounds great. Yeah. Interesting to note that, you know, I picked that particular copy, so I could do that one last sentence on one breath. It's amazing how many times people, you know, they, they, they tried because they're trying to project too much. They tend to take a breath in the middle of a sentence like, how do I edit out the breaths? How about not taking one? Right. Uh, so if you can do an entire lengthy sentence in one breath, that's going to save you a lot of time and a lot of editing time. So I figured I'd just throw that in there for, for, for an example. That's a very good point. So now we're going to go back to the Focusrite Scarlet Solo Gen 1. So going back. Right. But before we do that, we're going to take a break because- Oh, it's break time. It's break time. So go grab a soda or whatever it is, your favorite beverage. And listen to these incredible messages from our incredibly important sponsors. We'll be right back here on Voice Over Body Shop, Tech Talk, Interface. Shoot out, shoot out, shoot out. Well, hello there. I bet you weren't expecting to hear some big voice denouncer guy on your new orientation training for Snapchat, were you? Stick around. You don't want to miss this. Look what you made me do. Power 1039. At Target, we want you to come as you are. Be comfortable. Okay, maybe not. Bathrobe comfortable. Pants for the customer on aisle four, please. Watch anywhere, anytime on an unlimited number of devices. Sign in with your Netflix account to watch instantly at Netflix.com. The ice cream maker is a big risk that can have huge reward until you forget to turn it on. All right, that's it, guys. Time is up. Podcast platforms. The free version of Audio Cupcake does just what Level 8er does. RMS normalization and compression ready to be post-processed in your sound software. Unlock the premium version and Audio Cupcake finishes the job. By peak normalizing your wave files to minus 3 dB and outputting them as 192K MP3s ready to upload immediately. No more post-mastering. You're mastering. It's a huge time saver. Download Audio Cupcake for free at audiocupcake.com. That's audiocupcake.com. Hey, everybody. It's time to talk about source elements. You know who they are, the creators of Source Connect. That tool that you don't have. What? You don't have it. You should have it. It's that tool that allows you to connect your studio to other studios around the world so they can record you from your booth. It's a tool you should have because even if you're not being asked for it now, you might be asked for it tomorrow or in a month or in a year. You want to have it ready to go and know how to use it. It's really the heir apparent to ISDN technology. And it is definitely what the pros are using. You can go ahead and sign up for a 15-day free trial of Source Connect over at SourceElements.com. Get it up and running. Get your iLock account in order. There's a little video on there. I'll teach you how to do it by yours truly. And it'll help you get up and running so you can understand how it all works. Then that day that you get the gig, you can activate the license. It's a no-brainer. Give it a try. Thanks for your support, Source Elements. And we'll see you right after this break. We are. And we're doing an interface shoot out here on VoiceOver Body Shop. And yeah, I'm going to have to do a film of all the stuff. I'll show this in a second. Yeah. Here's a video of all the garbage that's been going on here. I mean, we've not really been in this. I'm the only one that's been in the studio for the last couple of weeks since we were all on quarantine lockdown here. And we've been doing the show remotely. And as you see, we're sort of doing it remotely this way today, this week. And so it only has to look nice in the frame of the camera. See, it looks fabulous. I could be in Carnegie Hall here for all you know. It looks great. But anyway, all right. So what's next on the hit parade here? We got the Focusrite Scarlet Solo Jennifer. Jennifer One. It's the Focusrite Scarlet Gen One, the original Scarlet Solo. Today, new technologies have become available, allowing organizations to become more proactive than ever before in their reliability journeys. You know, it sounds fantastic. I got no complaints about the Gen One. And that's, you know, the first gen. That's a Focusrite Solo. 100 bucks. Yeah. I mean, now we used to use that on the show. That was our monitor here when Sue, our director, is using that for the output for her headphones. And then it lost a channel in the headphone section. Right, right. If you pushed on the dial, it would get it. But she's not going to spend the entire time directing the show, holding that button in. So it got retired, but it still records. It still records just great. Yeah. So here's now we're going to really mix it up. So we're going to go from that $100 interface to the most expensive, by far, interface in the whole test. This is now the Apollo Twin Mark 1. So I don't have a Twin Mark 2 on hand or the Arrow, any of the new stuff. This is the Mark 1. It came out maybe four or five years ago. So here we go with the Mark 1 Apollo. I mean, as you would expect, it sounds great. It's in the same class sound-wise as all the best stuff in the test. But here's the question. That is an $800 interface versus $150 for some of these other ones, or $200 or so. Is it worth that $600 more to get that sound quality? Really, what is the difference between the Apollo Twin and all these other guys? And that has a lot more to do with features that it allows you to, for stuff, the stuff that I personally object to, which is bells and whistles and front end processing. Because when you record stuff on the front end, it's there forever. And if you really don't understand what it is that you are doing, and trust me, I've gotten a lot of samples in the last couple of days and weeks of people like, I don't really know what I'm doing. You know, sort of the old, Dr. It Hurts when I do that. Well, don't do that for crying out loud. Also, yeah, go ahead. You're recording oftentimes in your home. And the noise floor of your home ain't all that great most of the time. If you're lucky enough to have an actual separate home studio building like Dan, then that's a different story. And that's why Dan did this shoot out. He's got a really, really quiet space. I don't. But if you don't have an amazingly quiet space, the differences in the noise floor or little subtle things, never going to hear them. The problems you're going to hear are far more likely going to be caused by bad mic placement, bad acoustics, noise from the environment, noise from the microphone, all these other things. So yeah, these differences, that's why they're so subtle. They really don't make a big difference. Right. What the Apollo Twin has and what most of the universal products have is the ability to throw plug-ins in and really adjust the sound for what it was designed for, which is recording music. Performances. It's, it's, it's, and, you know, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago. If you're on microphone singing, you're throwing on a lot of what they like to call SPL, sound pressure levels. A good studio condenser mic is going to be able to handle that if you pot it down and you're going to get the right modulation and it's going to catch you really, really well. Voiceover is a lot more subtle because in reality, we're just trying to talk like, as I tell a lot of people, like you're sitting in the theater with your spouse or significant other or whoever. And when you're in the theater before the curtain goes up, I mean, you're hearing people primarily you're using your indoor voice because you don't turn to your spouse or friend or significant other and go, I think I left my keys in the car. And if you do do that, you better go have your hearing checked. It's exactly. So it's like, you know, it's more like, I think I left my keys in the car. And that's the read that you're hearing a lot of that casting directors are looking for. So if, if you're, you're trying to record and capture you as you exist. And when you add all of these plugins and all this stuff and somebody sent me a screenshot of all they're using, I'm like, oh my God, what are you doing? People are creating these control rooms for nuclear reactors to control that hamster running in a wheel. And it's like, don't you don't need this stuff. You're trying to sound as natural as possible. Now the Apollo twin sounds great. Nice, crisp, transparent and all that stuff. But so do these other guys. So what, what the big difference in cost there is really the ability to add all this other stuff that's none of your business. Well, the other problem, I mean, I know our scenarios that it's helpful and I have set up processing for people that do a lot of radio or TV affiliate things, things where they have to turn stuff around really, really quick. Right. It has to sound ready for air right out of the system. That's a whole different story and a very unique niche. Most everybody else, the audio needs to be clean and as it's recorded with nothing added. The thing is the other thing that comes along with these much more complicated units like the Apollo is the support ongoingly for updates, bug fixes, weird glitches with the hardware and software, the firmware, all those things add so many more variables. And trust me, I've been dealing a lot lately with Universal Audio Apollo's not being so, let's should we say consistent. There's been quite a few problems with them lately. So long story short, stick with the simple stuff and speaking of simple stuff, this is the simplest one and probably in this test or tied for simplest. And this is the Steinberg, you are 12. Here we go. Companies can no longer afford to be reactive across all industries. Organizations rely on the uptime of their equipment to be as productive and reliable as possible. As systems age, predictive maintenance efforts need to be kept up to date. Today, new technologies have become available, allowing organizations to become more proactive than ever before in their reliability journeys. We just went from $800 to $100, sometimes $79 on Amazon, depending on when you look. If you look hard enough, yeah. Give me your impressions of that. It still sounds great. It's very hard to tell the differences when you're hearing them. We're playing something, talking, playing something else, talking. So in doing so, it's harder to hear those little subtle differences until you really back to back play them. But that Steinberg, which not only does it function fine, it also has this loopback thing, which most of this other gear doesn't have. And if it does have it, like the Apollo, it's so frustratingly complicated to set it up that unless you pay me to set it up, you'll probably never figure out how to do it. The Apollo, I mean the Steinberg has it built in. It's just a little checkbox in the driver. It's just an amazingly good value, great sound quality. Now, we're using a great, great microphone with all this gear. Yeah, same mic. Some of your lower quality or lower output microphones say, for example, like a dynamic microphone, the differences between these might become a little more apparent, especially how much gain they're able to put out. So it does depend on a lot on the kind of mic you're using, but we're using the Sennheiser 416 because it's one of the most common voiceover mics in the biz. It's one that most everybody is familiar with, and it sounds great. Yeah. So should we play the mix and match? Well, I was going to say with the UR12, to me, and again, I mentioned history, but it seemed just a hair darker than say, say the Apollo twin, which sounded pretty good. But it sounded great. Yeah. So I go back to the shades of mauve. You know where the shades of mauve thing came from? I mean, I don't even know what the color mauve is. But in the movie Lost in Translation, the lead character is sitting in his office, his wife FedEx him, or in his hotel room, the wife FedEx him a box of carpet swatches for the office that they are remodeling. And it's a box full of probably like garnet colored fabric. And she's like, which one do you like the most? And he's looking at all these samples, and they're almost all exactly the same. And he's like, I don't know, honey, pick one. That's kind of how it is with this stuff. The color shade, the tonal difference from one to next is really subtle. This is mauve. This color right here on this flower here. So if you're wondering, great movie with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, by the way. So a real breakout movie for both of them, actually. Not that Bill Murray needed a breakout movie. But no, but it really set him in a different category. It really did. He's like, well, he's actually like a legitimate actor. It's actually kind of cool. Yeah, also, but I was also going to comment on the Apollo twin earlier that it was not easy to set up the software for that. A huge download, isn't it? It's like, all right, again, my name address, my name of my first born. And, you know, log in and create the account. But I got it working. So who cares? Yeah, no, it was a huge, huge download just to install that thing. Yeah. So it's a big, it's a big deal. Yeah. So tell me about your Mix and Match file, because this, I think, is maybe the most interesting thing of all. Well, I did a bunch of these, but this is the last one I did. It's Mix and Match number four. The thing about this was is I didn't get, when we were exchanging these files this week, it's like, okay, well, this one's this one, this one, this last one, I didn't give you that. It's like, we don't know what each one of these is, or where I did an edit to put it together. So play the file. This is, this is, I call this Mix and Match. This is the same script using a lot of different interfaces. You tell me if I submitted this as an audition, would an engineer be able to tell? All right, let's play this one. And this is also a great demo of how good, good editing sounds. It doesn't sound edited. God, I hope so. Take a listen. Companies can no longer afford to be reactive. Across all industries, organizations rely on the uptime of their equipment to be as productive and reliable as possible. As systems age, predictive maintenance efforts need to be kept up to date. Today, new technologies have become available, allowing organizations to become more proactive than ever before in their reliability journeys. Well, that was interesting. That was eight different interfaces, eight, eight different interfaces. We all know how well I count. That was, that was cool. Play it, play it again. All right. And I do now that I'm hearing them intercut right on top of each other. Now I'm starting to hear some subtle differences from one to the next. Companies can no longer afford to be reactive. Across all industries, organizations rely on the uptime of their equipment to be as productive and reliable as possible. As systems age, predictive maintenance efforts need to be kept up to date. Today, new technologies have become available, allowing organizations to become more proactive than ever before in their reliability journeys. Companies can no longer afford to be reactive. I was doing a hand gesture to see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. These are my better, worse, you know, going backwards. The last phrase was definitely different from the rest. And I will say that was the ID 14. That was the last. There is something, it has this thickness to it, almost like compression. Fascinating. That is really interesting. It definitely sounded different from the others. I'm not gonna say it's good or bad. It's just different. It just has a different sound. Right. So what is it that makes the difference between these interfaces? You know, I'm not an electrician. I am not an electronic genius. I didn't go to Virginia Tech. But what is it that makes, what is the difference between, say, this guy and this guy? I mean, what is it that they do that would make those differences? Well, I was supposed to be at Virginia Tech to study electrical engineering and supposed to learn all about circuit design. Sorry, I didn't mean to. But about halfway through, I lost my mind, couldn't stand it. And went to music. But I did train my ear and listened to a lot of stuff. I, so yeah, I mean, I mentioned a little earlier, the differences are the chips inside and what they choose to use for preamps and for the AD converters. And if you do a little googling online for AD converter chips or whatever, you'll see there's probably only like two or three companies that actually make them. So there's very little variation that it's going to be out there between all these units, especially when you're comparing them at the lower price range. Steinberg and Focusrite and Avid, all these $200 and less interfaces, very likely are going to use the same parts because they are not going to spend tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars developing their own chip on a $100 interface. So that's where things are going to be more similar. And then as you go up in price, it's more likely the company might actually develop some of their own componentry. But again, it's the AD converters are mostly going to be developed by one or two companies, maybe three, the preamps maybe are what vary the most. And so you do hear slightly different shades, colors, shades of mauve from one to the next, like in the middle, this one sample sounded a little bit slightly thinner and maybe band past. So it didn't have as much low or high end. Another part had not as much high end. You know, you hear these little things, but you really can only tell when you intercut them like this. Right. Exactly. So the thing, the question I think this all begs is, is one of these interfaces going to cost you a job versus one that's going to get you a job? To me, the whole idea of this entire exercise was to say, add in and think so. Voice acting comes down to your ability to read your way out of a paper bag. And there are an awful lot of people out there that we know here in Los Angeles and some in New York that, you know, they're well-known voice actors and they'll be driving along and they might be pulling into a McDonald's or something. And if they are, then, you know, that's their problem. But and they'll check their email. Oh, I've got to do this audition. They will pull over to a corner, take out their iPhone, record an audition on their iPhone and send it out and then get back in the drive-thru line. And they book work with this stuff. It's, you know, it's, you know, when you're producing, when you're doing a live remote with somebody or you are actually creating content for somebody, one, they don't watch your futzen with it a whole lot. But they're far more, when it comes to auditions, they are far more looking to see your ability to interpret copy and sound like you're not reading it. And that's got nothing to do with the microphone and the environment and things like that. You don't, what you don't want, and this is what George and I emphasize all the time, is you don't want anything else to be a distraction from your actual voice, which is why you don't want to add a lot of processing to it. You don't want to, you know, use noise gating and all these other things. You want to have the right environment. So your job is to use that computer the way it should be, which is like a cassette recorder, hit record, do your thing, hit stop and edit, but don't have to do a lot of processing. No, so. Yeah, I, you know, I want to be clear. You know, the context of this whole thing is for voice actors, right? Some of you guys are going to see this and you're going to be engineers. You're going to have really good ears and you might give us a hard time saying, it does matter. Quality matters. You know, this is a race to the bottom. You know what? That's your job as an engineer to have the best gear in the business because you're selling your time as an engineer. You're selling your studio. Okay, fine. You know, that's that people pay you to have those ears and pay you to have the best equipment. That's a whole different situation. So don't get me confused. The context of this is really which interfaces work best for voiceover and clearly from this test, they all work fine. They all do the job and we're talking 10 plus years of time span between all of them and they all still sound pretty good. So, you know, they're just different. I design philosophies, different features, different manufacturers, you know, involved and man, there's another 20 of these things out there that we didn't test. It's because we just don't have them slash we don't have the time. Right. But this is, I think, enough of a pool that I think we've proven our point. They all sound so similar that it just doesn't really matter. Right. Now, we know you guys are going to go, oh no, I heard that difference. And you're going to send us the files. They are going into the VOBS vault and staying there and I'm throwing away the key. So don't bug us. Don't bug us. All right. Well, that's the Mike shootout. We'll be right back to wrap all this up with a few final comments right after these messages. Yep. It's time for gift giving for the VO person in your life. And that's probably you. And right now at voiceover essentials.com, you can get the 20 color LED VO recording sign. It's flying off the shelf. Seriously, it's the holiday presence of 2020 from VOE. Now, this multicolor LED sign is perfect for alerting your household that you're recording and to keep it down. It comes with a remote that can control the colors of your secret codes. Get it now at voiceover essentials.com. And the top stocking stuffer this year. It's the ABS, the adjustable boom stop. No more droopy mics. Works with a tripod or a solid round base. It's three ounces of protection for your expensive microphone. Get them now at voiceover essentials.com. That's voiceover essentials.com. Thanks, Harlan. And we're back to wrap things up here on voiceover body shop tech talk. That was fascinating. Just to listen to them, you know. And the interesting thing is, you know, I'm listening to it on my equipment. I got a pair of Yamaha H5s. I've got my Harlan Hogan signature series headphones. And interestingly, playing it back through your system, it sounded just a little bit different. But they all sounded clean and crisp. So if you have to know your monitoring, whatever that monitoring is, you need to be very, very familiar with it. So it's whatever you pay for your speakers or your headphones or whatever it is, however it's how familiar are you with them? And I've been using this one and then the prior pair that I bought before them for over 20 years. I just know the way they sound. So I'm listening to on a consistent basis and I'm listening to this in comparison to thousands of other files. So that's my frame of reference. I'm not using studio monitors. I have a pair of massive Mackey HR824s right next to me. Giant behemoth speakers. I'm not using them for this kind of critical listening. No, you got to really, it does take headphones to listen to those and for editing and stuff. But in a good small home studio, it's good to have a good pair of studio monitors. So I think maybe I just need to adjust the trims on these a little bit because everything sounds a little bit muddy to me. But then again, so does my wife on occasion. So, and apparently the dog too. Come here, Harry. Whatever, whatever. Anyway, next week on this very show, we return live next Monday night with Carolyn Casey. And you know her, you've talked with her. She's a producer, a commercial producer and what are some of the other things she does? Many year, yeah, many year veteran. I believe she said 30 years of voice production or producing. But also, she is a voice actor. So kind of interesting. She's going to have perspectives on both sides of the glass, as we say. So that's going to be really interesting. All right, that's next Monday night here on Voiceover Body Shop. Thanks to all our donors who continue to contribute. If you need to donate to us, you do. Which by the way, you do. On our homepage, vobs.tv, you can click on donate now and give us a buck, give us 20 bucks, give us 500. It doesn't matter. It all helps. It keeps the technology flowing here and keeps the show on track every week. We try to give you guys fresh content. Every single week. So make sure you're here every week. We also like to thank our sponsors. Let's see if we can remember them without the script in front of us. Like Harlan Hogan's VoiceOver Essentials. I'm like a voice actor. If I don't have it in front of me, I can't. Okay, all right. So I'll go with VoiceOver Heroes, VoiceActorWebsites.com, JMC-Demos, VoiceOver X, Source Elements. VoiceOver Extra. VoiceOver Extra. And that's all. I think that's all of them. Thanks, guys. We can't do it without you guys either. And we really appreciate it. Well, I hope we proved something tonight. I know I think we did. But we'd love your comments on this. And as you're watching this on Facebook, give us your thoughts on it. We want to hear what you have to say. So that's going to do it for us. This week, next week with Carolyn Casey, and more tech talk coming up over the next couple of weeks. So eventually they're going to get let us out of our houses. So, you know, we're getting our hazmat suits out. We're going to get in there. But that's going to do it for us. Thanks for listening and for watching. I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Whittem. And this is VoiceOver. Body Shop. Or VOBS. Tech talk. Tech talk.