 Podcast is roundtable round 106 podcasting hardware What's up everybody? I don't think I said everybody correctly. So we're off to a roaring start where I'm already slurring my speech. I better have some more beer. Very open topic tonight, but we're gonna try to focus on hardware setups. That's two blunders in like the first 30 seconds. It's going horribly. Dave will edit this all out. He's our editor, not really. It's all live. It stays that way. We're trying to focus on hardware setups that are more suited to a podcasters budget. That's all so very subjective, but not a pro studio budget, right? So we're not a corporation who's building a full studio where we could load it with massive hardware. Hopefully this is attainable for some of you, right? So if you save your pennies and you might be able to add in a compressor or an audio interface or something like that. So we're not gonna be crazy about it, although I don't know, our guests might have crazy setups. I don't know, Gary's got quite a bit of stuff, but let's meet the round table. And I think our round table, hopefully we'll get bigger as we go. We'll grow up a little bit here, but Gary, welcome back. I'm sorry. Well, no, Gary, welcome back to the round table. It is good to be back. Thank you very much. What's your show, Gary? It is currently ham radio now at hamradionow.tv. I'm about to pull a pivot. I am shoving off my show to my co-host. Nice. Getting out of the ham radio business. I have got a URL called the Triangle Talk Show, and I'm gonna go do politics. All right. Man. Total tribut. Total. I was bummed. I thought it was gonna be a podcast about triangles. It'd be like, we have B-flat. Dang! I figured ham radio was out and I thought it was coming into our niche. I thought it was just- Podcasting. That's the- Our territory is called the Triangle and Research Triangle Park of North Carolina. Yeah. We all know ourselves as the triangle. So it's gonna be local, too. Nice. Very cool. And of course, Dave Jackson, I usually introduce you first, because you're our co-host. We're co-hosts here. But I just went right, flying right past you because today, clearly everything is not going well. And when you got to Gary, when you got to Gary, you just got to go to Gary. Yeah, Dave Jackson from the School of Podcasting.com. Yeah, and what a great episode to have a discussion about podcasting hardware when pretty much all of Dave's hardware is blowing up in real time. Yeah, I'm not sure what happened. I know today I actually, because it's weird, because what's a mouse made out of? Mostly plastic. And I touched my mouse and saw an actual, your static electricity kind of sparked, and my mouse quit working. I had to unplug it and plug it back in. And then everything was fine yesterday, and I went to get on a call, and all of a sudden my microphone was really, really quiet on my Electrovoice RE320, to where I had to train the gain all the way up on my mixer and the chain. I mean, everything's just all the way out. I was able to get through the call, and then later I started checking it, and it's just, it's not distorted, but it lost about 18, 15 dB of, you know, out of the microphone. And I thought that was it. And then I have an old Apex. You had, you had. I had, yes, an old Apex master voice channel. And I noticed that the clip light was on constantly, and then I unplugged it. So there was nothing plugged into it, but yet it was still clipping. And I went, oh, that's not good. And so when I got a different microphone and plugged things in, this one now just gives me a lovely hum. You just, you plug it in, you get, hmm, and I went, well. So yeah, cause these things are not cheap. I bought it on eBay, used for 500 bucks. See, so this is a space everyone clearly as a podcaster, you want to get into hardware because you want to have all of these problems. Gary, does that even sound right? Do you think static electricity could cause both of those things to go out like that? Seems odd. Debugging stuff is, there's sweet mysteries. Yeah, and what's interesting is I have an actual line conditioner, not a surge protector, like a line conditioner that I have my computer, my monitors, everything plugged, in fact, everything in here is plugged into line conditioners just because I know I've had a blue fuse once and throughout my routers. So I was like, all right, line conditioners for everyone. And so I would be really surprised if that was it, but it's kind of weird that both of them went out at the same time. So something went kablooey somewhere. And by the way, everything in all of my studio and editing, everything is on big UPSs. Nothing's plugged into the wall. Interesting, and so that just being in the U, what is it, UPS, universal power supply? Uninterrupted power supply. Uninterrupted. You typical APC, you can buy them at Best Buy. The biggest one you get at Best Buy. Right, so what is that doing for you? I mean, explain that a little bit, because that's what these are. If there's a power glitch, the computers don't reboot and see any kind of interruption. And the conditioners- I mean, you're still connected to power. I mean, power has to go to that first, right? But in theory, you've got essentially what Dave would have in between, which is the power conditioner. Well, but yeah, they're doing more than they're doing conditioning as well. They're just a buffer between you and the power system. But yeah, a static, an arc or something, that can take out all kinds of stuff, because there's not a lot of current available in them, but there's a real high voltage. So if it's a sensitive electronic component, it can fry. Yeah, and then what I like about it is in the event the power does go off, all of them start beeping at me and I've got about five to 10 minutes to shut everything down so that it doesn't, so the next time I turn it on, Windows doesn't go, you were shut down improperly, blah, blah, blah. I've got time to get whatever I want off the computer. That's really the big thing is sometimes you're working on a file that's only on that computer and you're like, oh, if I'm gonna get on my laptop, I gotta get this off this computer. So that's the other thing I like about it. Yeah, it feels like, well, this is gonna be, I think, a fairly visual episode. I think we have a little show until they've already held up the unit he was talking about. You don't need to see it, but YouTube.com slash podcast is roundtable. That's where you should go or podcastersroundtable.com slash live. It's always up there, podcastersroundtable.com slash guests if you wanna sign up to actually show stuff on the roundtable. Show and tell is good. We don't mind that here as long as we describe it for the audio audience as well. And so, yeah, I mean that first piece of gear, I didn't even think about that connection. I do have a power conditioner and like a Furman strip surge protector thing. I have a couple of things, hopefully, in between me and the power source. And I don't know. I mean, because we do have, all of us here have decent pieces of audio hardware that we would like to protect. Like Dave said, even buying it on use, it costs a lot of money. So trying to protect it, but it's unfortunately, sounds like a goner who knows and you contacted them and they don't even, they said they can't even fix it for you. Yeah, and they did send me to a place that can repair it. And I call it. The price that it would cost that you bought it? Well, for the price of a DBX286S, basically it's 300 bucks to repair it. Cause I called them and I said, hey, you were recommended by Apex. I need to know if this is even worth. And they're like, oh yeah, we fix those all the time. So, cause it does have a tube in it. It's a tube preamp. And they said it might be the tube, it might be this and that, but they basically said, I can send them 50 bucks, mail it to them. They'll look at it, call me back. Oh. Yeah. Australia. Oh, there we go. So here's another visual element of our hardware episode here or hardware round is that Dave has like an XLR cable just dangling there. So you're like, how is Dave, how are you even hearing Dave? Well, he's got a USB slash XLR microphone using the USB connection, but he just went out. So Dave, as we, as we witness the live studio, his mic is also doing this weird thing or it sounds like he's just Is it, am I back to normal? Yeah, you're back to normal. Oh, well, you know, Yeah. So I can, I can mail the two of them in California, which we know won't be cheap. Give them 50 bucks. They'll give me a quote and they said it was somewhere between 275 and 300 to get it fixed. So getting a DBX. Yeah. Well, I have one sitting here that I had one before and I just always said, man, if I could ever get one of those things, I would get one on a friend of mine said, Hey, I have one on eBay if you want it. And I was like, ooh, cause they're normally a thousand dollars brand new. And I was like, dude, the Apex master channel in But you have a, you have a DBX as well. I have a DBX, I have a refurbished DBX 286A. This is before they came up with the S and I had that for years and love it. And what was weird is when I was researching, you know, whatever they call them channel strips, everything, everything I saw was DBX 286, 286, 286. It was always in there. It's affordable in every review I saw, which I know everybody loved it. So I was like, well, maybe I'll just stick with the 286. And at least for now, you know, it's like, So what does that do? Is that EQ and Yeah, the and gating and stuff. Yeah, the 286, it's a, it's a gate compressor, delimiter noise gate. De-esser. Yeah. Wait, what's it missing from the, is it, it's not a preamp. Is it a preamp? The two on the S. So you're hearing the S right now. I mean, well, now you're hearing it. I have actually two 286 S's and there's one just all lit up with nothing connected to it. So it's kind of sad it's waiting for a microphone. But wait, so what's it, because I've got the DBX 286S, which you'll hear a lot about, at least in our circle here, preamp compressor, de-esser. It's like got this low and high basically. Just a punch and whatever. And a gate, expanded gate. So wait, what's the A? I don't understand what the difference is. It was nothing, basically. Mine's black and yours is silver. Oh, yours is black. So it's just like a new model. Interesting. It was the, oh, I think it came before the S. Yes, I would think that A would come for S, but you know, these things are weird. I would think. They skipped a lot of models. Right. Not leaving themselves in the room. But I've had that for years and just this one came up and a friend of mine, and I was like, all right, I got it and it's been sitting there and then... I think the big question is why though. I mean, so what? Like why? You know what I mean? Like people were wondering, why is that coveted? Why would you want it more for years? That's a great question. I hear you now on a USB mic and it sounds pretty damn good. It's one of those things. It's one of the few times I've spent money. And again, it was a lot of 500 bucks. I don't care. That's a lot of money in anybody's world. And I saw this at one of the very first new media expos and said, oh man, it just makes you sound great. And what it does differently than the 286, the 286 has more or less a bass and treble button that, well, with this one, you can pick what frequency you want to boost. And they call it big bottom. And then the upper end is called a vocal enhancer. So you can get really fine tune on what frequencies you want to boost. And it is cool. Is it worth $300 cooler than the 286? No. And it was one of the first pieces of equipment that I kind of went, ooh, you know what? This isn't really, you know, I just wasted 500, it wasn't a waste of 500 bucks. It was a great piece of equipment. But I wasn't getting, it's like what I say, if you take a, like right now I'm using an ATR 2100 and we got an Electrovoice RE320, this is 300, this one's 80. Is there $220 difference? I don't think so. The law of diminishing returns, right? Spend a lot more to get a tiny bit better. Yeah, and that was it. I spent a lot more and I was like, okay, yes, I can adjust the EQ, but it's not like my listeners went up because I had a Apex MasterJet. Oh, yes, they did. Yes, they did. They were 10 subscribers at least. And I think why people do that is for me, like if I'm playing the guitar and I don't like the sound coming out of my amplifier, I play worse. I'm not as confident. I don't like, it affects the way you play. And I think some of that has to do with the way people wanna have that big, warm, fuzzy sound. So they then feel maybe a little more confident when they talk, I don't know. But I think that's, I know for the Apex, that was definitely when the, I was on a crowded, noisy floor at New Media Expo and the guy turned on the gate, turned on the big bottom and all this other stuff. And I went from sounding like AM radio to just phenomenal. And I was like, oh, if I ever have a chance to get one of those, I'm gonna do it. So I did and I did, but. Which I feel like there's an evolution of that where you start off podcasting and you want that radio sound, you want that big bottom. And then you realize, eh, I don't wanna be like so colored. I don't want it to be so, not me. I mean, you know, or I don't need this voice or need what's any more genuine. I mean, for me, I, no one likes their own voice. So I had to pull back a little on, you know, and I was even doing things wrong. You boost the low end. I think that's a common rookie mistake to make you sound like, you know, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, and it's just like, it's just not, not who you are. Not what I need to be. I like my voice. Gary, I think has a good voice. Cause I don't, no matter what Mikey plugs in, he sounds good. So. This is one of those ATR 2100s. That's right. And so that's what's funny about this episode as well. Cause Gary also had, I, did you have hardware issues? What was going on? I had, I had unplugged one of the things that I'm going to do show and tell on at the end of a previous show, I was just wrapping up one of my shows and I was talking to my co-host and I'm talking about coming on this show and I said, I'm going to show this thing off and I unplugged it from the computer and that was it. Everything went down. I'm doing some reboots and the computer wasn't seeing the Wirecast virtual camera to get to hangouts. And so I was going to reboot the computer completely and discovered it was getting ready to do a creators update, Windows creators update. It was going to be 10 minutes away. This is the story of live. I rushed over here to my editing area and plugged in the camera and this microphone was sitting up here for, cause when I talked to people on Skype. Nice. So yeah, all the stuff that I was going to show over there I can't show cause it's all over there, but I'll talk about it. Yeah. I remember last time you were here you had a nice little backdrop with some, some pretty gear in the background. So, but this is perfect. Like I'm, well, my editing system. What is that piece? Because I have a feeling that is something I want to talk about. This is, it's from cable matters. It is a USB to HDMI. Did you know that all of your video from your computer can come out the USB port? All your video from the computer can come. Okay. As if all the normally people when they plug in a computer monitor plug it in HDMI or DVI or in the old days, you know, a VGA. VGA. But all of the video that comes out of your computer is available at the USB output. So available. Where am I plugging this into? Any of the USB connectors on your computer? No, I'm saying is like, where am I plugging my computer in via USB to display it somewhere else? You're taking it to TV? Oh, yeah. To a monitor. To a monitor. Yeah. So if you've only got one monitor on your computer and you decide you want a second one, or a third one, or in my case, a fourth one, and your video card has only got one output or maybe it's got two and you've already used two and now you want a third one, you could buy a bigger video card, you could buy a second video card or you could spend about 30 bucks and get this and plug it in USB on one end. And there's, this one is HDMI, but they make them with VGA, DVI, all the available outputs. Interesting. And it, you plug it in and it shows up in Windows anyway as just another monitor pops up. And you would think, well, could it handle video? Can it handle, it might not be able to handle 4K video at 60 frames per second, but it can handle ordinary 1080 video at 30 frames per second, just fine. Right. So. That's interesting. Yep. And it's small, it's easy to carry around. Yeah, so I was thinking you have, because it looks similar to like, I was thinking, I've used iMic several times. I don't use it now, but iMic is a little, basically USB out of your computer. And then it gives you an analog input, the 3.5 millimeter inputs. And typically this will be used to plug in like an analog mixer and a Mix Minus type setup. And I was curious how each of you, I'm sure each of you have done a Mix Minus from your computer or from your mixer into a computer. How you're achieving that. We might have a bigger, better gear. There are expensive ways to do that. And it's just one thing, it's like a weakness point in podcasting. When I, it's like, well, you can get this, they're not cheap and iMic is like 30 bucks, but it seems cheap. It seems on-pro to have this like little plastic connector and that is your connection between. I'm curious how, so Dave, when you run a Mix Minus from your mixer, how are you connecting that? How are you getting that into your computer? The same thing, Griff and iMic. It's, it looks like a little hockey puck kind of thing. But I liked it because it has a mic input, but it also has a line. Right, you can switch between mic and line. So that's why, and I'm with you, it's like 30 bucks. I know you can buy these other little, like it looks like a USB stick for like four bucks on Amazon. That was a terrible, yeah. The funny thing to me though, is like, you're like, hey, buy this, you know, $600 mixer, it's beautiful. You've got this $30,000 computer and in between go buy this like cheesy little thing and that's your connection. I'm like, where's the pro? I'm curious what the recommendation was what are people giving out for that? Gary, do you have ever done that? Take an analog mixer and put into a computer? Well, I do use a mixer and I recommend anybody who's gonna get moderately serious about podcasting to get a mixer rather than try to do all of your inputs and outputs right to the computer. Cause even for a simple microphone and Skype setup, a mixer gives you more control, more manual control. Of course, you know, I'm from very old school. I think I'm probably one of the oldest people you've ever had on the round, David, I'm 60. I'm old or not, look. Yeah, neither of us have gray hair, you know, David, I don't know, you go on gray. I started what I was doing, yeah, I do. It's going through here, trust me. I'm losing it, but, you know, what I've got left is only my hairdresser knows for sure. I recommend, well, I was gonna say, I'm from old school, you know, I did disjockeying and stuff back in the day, and disjockeys always ran combo operations, you know, you're running your own mixing board and all that stuff. So I'm used to the idea of grabbing all that stuff and, you know, and tweaking it with my hands. But I always recommend having the mixer because it gives you a lot more flexibility. I was specking stuff out for my co-host who's taken over the Ham radio now show and looking at potentials for mixers. And this concept of mix minus, I know confuses people like crazy because I remember back when I was first learning about it and it does what? And so I was looking for mixers that had mix minus capabilities defined as this is what this part of the mixer is for. And I didn't find anything in our price range in the couple $100 price range. I've used professional mixers at the radio stations that had mix minus, all kinds of configurable mix minus, but those were thousands and thousands of dollars. So, yeah. Don't most USB mixers kind of have that build in? That's no, I mean, like, you know, they do have, some mixers will have like where it, what comes in the USB won't go back out the USB. So it's got like a, like I have on this mixer over here, USB through and it'll allow the USB to go through the mix and come back to the computer for like overdubbing music stuff, stuff I don't do. Okay. But to do a mix minus, you can't do that. I don't, eh, I don't know, I never trust it. Well, yeah. Some people think they're doing mix minus and getting away with it because Skype will block a certain amount of feedback or echo return. They're not really set up with the mix minus and at any moment you could, you could get that, that feedback return. But my, my initial attempt with Skype, I discovered something by accident and I don't know that this is still the case. Skype is mono. Yes. It only listens to the right, to the right channel and if you feed left channel, you do some audio in the left channel, Skype doesn't hear it. Yeah, that's a big problem. A while ago. I don't know if it's still. No, it's still the case. And it's a huge issue because everything is fine when you're, when you're a solo host going into a mixer. So that's why oftentimes a mix minus works because if you have multiple people in studio, you need that analog. You need the mixer to send it all out one channel, basically the aux out of one mono channel, right? When you have a multi-channel mixer, you try to plug in multiple people in the studio and also have a conversation with Skype. It doesn't work because Skype only hears left channel. Only hears one, basically channel one. And so none of those other people are being heard, at least not through the connection. So you need to then pass it through software to get everyone to be heard. So that's one reason why, you know, you go buy a multi-channel mixer and you think, oh, well, I've got multiple people in here. I want all separate channels. You just use USB and not exactly. You can set it up. It will work through, then you budget, they have to go with software as well, which again, I prefer hardware. There are ways, it's a whole other round to talk about what you can do with software because everyone's probably yelling at the screen or their phone right now saying, just do it. There's a way to do a software. I realized that. That's another round. We have that conversation. But doing things with hardware, I prefer like Gary saying more control. I like being hands-on. I like being able to push a dial or a slider or a button or whatever it is. Get my hands on it. Or software, I can't get the things as quick and doesn't mean it's any better or worse, but I prefer hardware when I can. That said, it can be more cumbersome and it can cause more issues because you have basically more things in the way. People think, oh, they're gonna add on. It's funny when you build upon your podcast studio, add new gear and it kind of automatically feels like, well, if I get this new gear, everything will be better when it actually could get worse. It can be, you increase the potential issues, you increase the complexity of the setup, right? Yeah, the more things you add, the more things can break. So the minimum level of the mixer for me will have two, what they call auxiliary buses. Right. So on any given audio channel, you've got the main fader that sets the volume. And you've got two more, typically not faders, just volume pots that feed to discreet, totally separate outputs of the mixer. So if you've got three or four people on microphones, you can, and then a channel dedicated to Skype, you turn up the aux pot for each of the microphones that you wanna feed, but you leave that aux pot for the Skype turned down. So Skype's not coming at your aux output. Then you feed the aux output into your computer and tell Skype to look at that input to the computer. That's one of the nice things about using Skype is that Skype looks across all the potential audio sources that you've got feeding into your computer and lets you pick the one that you want. The hangouts here does the same thing. But your speakers can be hearing one thing and Skype can be hearing something totally different. And that's an advantage once you figure it out. But boy, there's a handy guide and video. There's a great tutorial, video, complete walkthrough with pictures and gear. It's amazing. I don't know who created it, but if you go to thepodcastersstudio.com slash mix minus, you'll find it. Yes, I had to give, I had to have my Daniel moment, get my plug in. I missed it with Daniel. So I have to supplement the plugs here. Daniel's on hiatus. Don't worry. It is a great video. If you've never seen it, Ray does a great job on that. And something to keep in mind, the more stuff you add is when things go wrong, when something goes wrong in any kind of setup, what you need to do is start isolating things. So last night when my stuff went down, first thing they did was I went in another room and grabbed another microphone, plugged it in. Okay. And immediately saw the problem go away, at least with one of them. I'm like, okay, that's easy. That microphone has a problem. But then when I was dealing with my interface, what are we calling that? It's not an interface. It's a, I mean, it's a compressor. It's a processor. Yeah, whatever. Process. I'm processing. There you go. So then it was a matter of, okay, is it the cable going in? Is it the cable going out, et cetera, et cetera? So the more stuff you add when things go wrong, it's not as easy to figure out what went wrong because you have so many pieces that you have to go through. So. Yeah, this happens when you have like hits all the time and noise, people are like, oh, where is it? You just got to pull everything out of the system and plug one thing back in at a time. Go Gary. And now do that on a live nationwide NPR radio. Yeah, no. And I guarantee you, I guarantee you when you were live or you were going to be in front of an audience, stuff is going to go wrong. I've practically been in this situation recently. So I've recently been in a couple of well-known theaters here in the U.S. In front of thousands of people we're ready to record with a bunch of gear. I travel with too much gear. Not too much, it's hardware. I got to have it. But yeah, things are going to go wrong. So if you buy hardware, I hope you got to spend a lot of time with it. That's the thing you can't, I think a lot of people like that A-fix that you had, Dave, where you heard a big bottom. And someone in the chat, I even said they got a DBX, they said they went, took their Christmas money and they went out and got a DBX. I think they got a 286. Gabe Gonzalez. And he says, it's very cool. Just need to learn how to set it up better. And that's the thing, these aren't plug and play. No. And a DBX specifically is very weird. It doesn't use the standard like threshold and ratio of another compressor or a DSR or stuff like that. So these things you buy, you have to spend a lot of time dialing them in. Yeah, the best thing you can do is make a recording and just record yourself saying, okay, I'm turning the gain knob is at 10 o'clock. The such and such knob is at 230 and the DSR is on at minus nine. And just talk what your settings are. And then you can go back and listen and go, oh, I really liked recording number two. And then I have to go, wait, was that the one with the thing? You just go back and listen to number two and it will tell you how to set your knobs. That's probably one of the, I learned that just through trial and error once. And just because you're like, well, you know, you listen to like, oh yeah, number three was the best. And then you're looking through your notes and you're like, wait, which one was, which one was number three? Which one was number three? I've spent, there are so many recordings of me. One, two, check, hey, okay, three, four, raise it up to six, level six. This is level six. And then I go back to the ones and I'm like, wait, where was level 12? No, I'm never gonna get this right. Like, oh, I've spent so much time. And that's it. Hardware is gonna get you, what you buy when you buy hardware is a ticket to lose a lot of time. You're gonna be, and hopefully you're gonna spend a lot of time with it. Gary, I think you had something to say. I spent almost no time doing audio testing and stuff like that. Cause that's almost second nature to me. All the time I've spent with AB testing on my systems has been video trying to get the cameras right and getting the right gels on the light. There's more gear, yeah. This round here, I'm using a laptop computer instead of my beautiful new iMac because there's just something going on with the camera, the USB, it just doesn't look the same. So, hey, I'm going to the backup solution. Having a backup is usually a key. And that happened here. We have Alex who was supposed to be here. It's his first hangout. And I need to ask that before people join us. Have you done a hangout before? Excuse me. And, you know, again, issues. It wasn't detecting his audio or something like that. And unfortunately he didn't have a USB mic cause that's usually what I go to. I'm like, hey, if you have a USB mic, toss that in. Use the app, use the earbuds, anything, you know? Having that backup option is huge. Yeah. And if you think that it's a problem for you and it's worse for you than anybody else, just go watch the TWIT network in between the shows when they're trying to get to the top. You realize that we all have this problem. Yeah, I mean, it's just, that's it. It's set up, it takes, that's the thing. Getting more gear means more time spent messing with gear. And for us, that's enjoyable, but for not everyone. So, you know, USB mic, you know, I kind of, that was kind of the premise of this, of this round was you buy a microphone, when do you quote unquote upgrade? When is it time to add another piece of gear? I was curious, what's one piece of hardware using right now in your setup that software could be doing? So for me, it would be that DBX because I could do gates and compressing. I can do all that. And this microphone is going into a mixer. It's going to DBX first as a preamp. And that one of the primary reasons I have it is for a preamp dynamic mics. I like having as much clean available gain as I can get. Now it has the advantage of having expansion and a little compression and stuff like that. I don't use very much of those things. I will do more of the processing of the audio in post-production. Dave, what's one thing you're using right now? Well, I mean, it's all blown up. Yeah, right now I don't, I'm not using anything. It's ATR 2100 into the computer, but I have the same thing as you. I, you know, when I get things hooked up, I'll be using a DBX 286. And when I was researching today, you know, processors, I saw an article that was like, hey, use this waves plugin and it does everything that you're doing in hardware with software. And I thought about that because it was gonna be a little less, I think, than, you know, some of the other items. And I just thought, for me, I like the way, I like the way it sounds live. I wanna hear that compressor and the, everything else. I kinda like to hear what I'm recording as I'm recording it instead of fixing it later. Well, that's a different way to think of live. Cause when I think of live, so one of the things that hardware does for me is this, what we're doing right now. Being going live, if you're gonna do that, there's no post-processing on live, right? So the hangout video, the YouTube video that will result in this, I'm getting pretty much the audio that I want to get recorded, baked into the YouTube video because this will be an audio-only podcast and that'll have some other processing. But without any processors, I wouldn't get that into a live. So if you're going to be a guest on another show, not even live, you're gonna be a guest on another show and they're gonna record you and maybe you want to have some control over that audio, having, sending them a little bit of processed audio could give you that control. Maybe you wanna dial in the mic the way you like it. Now, of course they could do post-production and slaughter it, but at least you can send them the audio you want. Gary, what's one piece you're using right now that can be done by software? Well, I'm in David's situation and I just had to scramble to get over on this computer. So although I'm going through a little Alexis mixer so at least there's a mixer in there. But I do the same. It's not the smallest one, the fours. There's one that's really bad. Yes, it's a two microphone four channel. Yeah, it's probably terrible. What are the numbers on it? Well, it sounds fine. It's the mini multi-mix six. Okay, I don't think, oh yeah, multi-mix. No, I don't think that's it. I did a $100 mixer shootout and the only one that didn't survive was a lysis and I actually love a lysis in general. My very first multi-channel mixer, which I still have it's fireware. I don't want to get rid of it was a lysis and it's very good, but this one four zero, this one lysis four, something it was not good. Anyways, good. And this was about 70 bucks, I think. Yeah, I do the processing in post as well, but I'm starting to do more Facebook live. And so if you listen with headphones, if you listen carefully, you can tell that you can hear my computer fans and all the stuff in the background. If you listen to headphones, turn the volume way up. And then if you listen to the show that I put on YouTube, which has got some gating, that background noise goes away. And I think that's, I think there's something to that because when you talk about podcasting is intimate, but it's mainly because most of the time people have ear pods shoved right in their ear. So, you know, we're talking about quality and stuff like that. I think you do hear more of the blemishes. If audio is bad, it's going to stick out more in a podcast. Now a lot of people listen in their car and commute and they can't hear anything over road noise, but so many people do put you right, literally right in your ear that bad audio will be noticeable more often, especially if you go from a really well produced show to a, I won't say bad, but a lesser quality of audio. Yeah, I think Facebook and maybe YouTube, I think that they take the audio that you're sending and in pretty much real time as they're working on it, they do some work for you. Yeah, and they destroy it. Well, they destroy it, but they also do some compression. And you need speech compression to fill out the volume so that you don't have stuff that's way too soft and peaks that are way too loud. A little bit of equalization if you like it. And the gating, if you're in a room, it's not perfectly quiet. All those things are important. And that's what I do in software, but I'll have to set up for hardware to be able to do that. Yeah, the other reason why I like the hardware was I was recording my Skype interviews with just a 2100 and then I would do the rest of my show through all my big, fancy tools. And so everything would sound great and then I would come to the interview and all of a sudden, and again, this is one of those things where I'm listening through podcaster ears. The person listening in the car doesn't notice that the microphone changed in EQ from where Dave was talking at the beginning and now he doesn't sound quite as basic, but I notice it, of course, which is kind of a curse. Podcaster ears are kind of a curse at times. And so that was the other thing. I thought, well, if I do this, I can still record through Skype and everything will be the same, but now my microphone won't sound different on the interview part. So it's a stupid little mental thing, but that was the other reason why I wanted to add the processing in as I recorded. A lot of times we do it for ourselves too. I mean, we are, you're gonna spend a lot of time on this thing, so you wanna be happy with the audio producing as well. So. So if you have, both of you are coming through ATR 2100, is there USB microphones and you're doing just fine? When do you, when does someone- I bought one with XLR. What's that? I bought one with XLR. It's going XLR, right? Even better, that's how Gary's got it. We're using it both ways. But when does a podcaster need to think about a piece of hardware? I guess even more specifically, when would you think about getting into a mixer? Immediately. Why? I mean, if you're USB, I mean, I don't know that there's a quality difference. So why do you say that? Well, if all you're doing is recording yourself, you don't need it. That's right. If all you're doing is recording yourself and one guest on Skype, you don't need it. If you're adding another human being in your studio, you need it. Yes, that's when I would say you're starting to consider a mixer. I mean, people who listen to this show may get a mixer for one of the reasons I got a mixer, to learn a mixer. Like I just wanted to learn, right? I mean, because we're those types. We're podcasts. You may also bring in other audio sources. You may bring in something from a browser. Sound effects, right? Anything that you're doing live. Any extra audio source becomes hard to control if you're trying to tell your computer what to do with it. And easy to control if you're feeding into a channel in the mixer. And that leads me to my next show and tell. Oh, excellent. This little thing. I discovered when I first started plugging things from my computer into my mixer that the computer, well, when it was feeding the speakers, everything was fine. But when I tried to run it into a mixer, I got noise loud enough that it was pretty irritating and very raucous. Because the computer's full of processors and oscillators and stuff that is just making all kinds of crap. Putting it on the audio line, I don't know why the speakers don't hear. I don't know where their magic is. So this little device makes it go away. And that is a... Ground loop isolator. The ground loop isolator, this one is M-P-O-W-M-POW. It's 10. I can exactly, I could pull like two of those out. Yep, I've had several different versions. I've had two of the pile ones that have gone out on me, but I have literally probably that, what you're holding up now in a different generic brand. I'll put this up to the speaker. Yeah, it's a different generic brand and I can click on that. And it's just a simple 3.5 millimeter input to a 3.5 millimeter output basically. And it basically just eliminates the ground loop if you have one and not always. So I find Mac computers a lot of times have that ground loop. They got a lot of stuff going on, especially laptops in a small space or even iMacs are packing a lot of stuff in there. Put that in between and you'll often you'll often eliminate a ground loop. But those have saved me again. I've been on, I've been in huge theaters and picked up a ground loop and threw in a $10 piece and boom, it was gone and it saved the day. It's 10 bucks. I first discovered this not trying to do stuff in my studio, but in my car, trying to plug my phone into the audio system in my car and it's an older car. So it had the stereo eighth inch input, but it didn't have all the Bluetooth and the extra stuff. And plugging my phone in was fine, but then the battery would die. And so when I plugged the phone into power, then that raucous noise appeared. And I knew doing an isolation with transformers was the deal, but I hadn't gone investigating the market to see what was out there. So I just looked on Amazon and saw this thing. I thought this small, could this really give you decent fidelity? Was everything going through it gonna sound like that? Yeah, sounds fine. Yeah, for me, my ground problem produced this extremely annoying high-pitched wine. Was it because you were holding on to the XLR cable while you? Well, here's the thing. Dave's currently doing that for that only. I do that because the 2100 is so light, it floats away. Flew away from his face. I think it really looked like a studio is literally blowing up. Things are flying around. But yeah, I had this high-pitched wine that was just really annoying. So I have a bunch of, everything goes in and out of a noise, canceling device like that when the ground loop isolator, because I just had tons of problem when I moved into this office. Yeah, so that connection, I mean, I've used it several times. And here, even coming out of the audio for this, I think I used to maybe take it out of the sound card of the computer. But even coming out of the audio interface, sometimes a ground loop. So I'll put a ground loop isolator, which is that little cheap $10, $7 item there. I'll put it in between the computer or the audio interface, basically the output of the computer and the audio recorder that the audio version of this is being recorded in. And most of the time, how it will work, it's not always the case, but it's good to have on hand if you're getting that buzzing, whining sound. That is, it's a classic sound that you'll know once you hear it, you'll recognize it again. So you can always tell that sound. Mixers we hit on a little bit. Obviously there are many different types we talked about. Just me. What's that? Did you lose us, Dave? Yeah, I was like, is that what it's you? It's you. Hopefully. And mixer versus audio interface. I have both in front of me. I'm actually using both right now. What is your answer on this? I would love to hear this. It depends. The answer that you're always going to get, it depends. And this is why I tell people all the time, ask me before you buy gear because it depends on your setup, right? So like if you want to do that, mix minus, if you have multiple people, you can do that with audio interface, but mix minus is a little harder to do. They don't typically have auxiliary outputs. Now some audio and audio interfaces, the way they work and the way Skype works, what Gary was alluding to, you can kind of hack a mix minus. But yeah, if you are, and if audio interfaces do multi-channel as well. So again, it depends on what you're doing. What are you doing? Are you getting multiple people in your studio to record into software, multi-channel, audio interface? Sure. Are you going to bring in Skype and try to have Skype hear all of those channels? Well, you could do with audio interface. You're going to have to hack it with, I don't know if to hack, but you're going to have to use software so Skype can hear it because it's a Skype limitation. So it depends on what you're doing. It could depend on budget, right? The Scarlett Focusrite series, which is what I have, the 2i4, has really nice preamps. And it just may be all you need. So I don't know, what is your experience, Dave, with preamps? I mean, I'm sorry, audio interfaces. The only one I use is the iMic. That's why I was like, I've... Our definition of audio interface, which could be a mixer as well, is different. So I guess I should be a little more specific. I'm talking about like a box that has XLR inputs. Yeah, the only thing I've ever played, yeah, the only thing I've played with was the Mixpre 3. And I loved it. I thought that was awesome. Which is a different category on its own, right? Because the Mixpre 3 is a audio recorder and audio interface. And that is actually the one I would put a lot of people on. It is a almost all-in-one solution. It's beautiful. Yeah, I use my H5 as an interface because I was thinking of getting like a 2i2 or a 2i4 like you have just for those times that I don't need a mixer. I just want to throw a microphone into something and it don't... An XLR microphone into something. Yeah, and I was just, I'm sitting there thinking, I'm like, well, the H5 is an interface if you hit the right button. And I've been doing that for a while now. So that's how I've basically been using it as an interface. Yeah, and the key, the difference there with the Mixpre is that the Mixpre can do both at the same time. So the H5 is a recorder that can also be an interface, but you have to pick one. The Mixpre is a recorder and an audio interface at the same time. Right. And what makes it a mix beyond the fact that it's sound devices and their preamps are insane? What Gary? I don't think I've ever used just a dedicated audio interface, just a box that gets from one thing to another. I've always done it through a mixer. I've considered some things I'll need for doing some field recordings. And I have a field mixer that is not very flexible. It's just for mic inputs and outputs. And for what it's doing, it's fine, but it's not very flexible. It doesn't give me the Mixminus capability as no aux outputs. So, you know, I'll look for something small and compact, but still with all the capabilities of a mixer. One thing that you had mentioned that we've tossed around a little bit, but haven't really explained the advantage of is a mixer that has a USB input and output. Because that's, it's not available in every mixer. It's getting more and more common. But the idea was foreign to me five years ago. What does the USB do? And it plugs into your computer and it becomes another sound card. You can listen with your headphones on the mixer and get anything in your computer out your headphones, but it's not actually going into the mixing channels of the mixer unless you want it to. But the output of the mixer, you don't have to fiddle with a whole bunch of, you know, stereo chords and then find a way to get them into your computer and then discover that you got to use a couple of these because it's got a whole lot of extra noise. You've got that nice, clean digital USB signal going into your computer and then feeding whatever you're feeding your recording system. And it's a very clean, easy way to do it. So if you're going for a mixer, make sure that it's got USB capability. Yeah, the mixer that I've, I were to buy one right now to test, I would love to play with. It's a PreSonus AR8, it's USB. It's got two auxiliary sends. One's FX and one's auxiliary. Same, it is basically same. I get this question on YouTube all the time. So people say, I only have FX send, you have an auxiliary send. They just tend to be one is pre-fader, one's post-fader. So it's got four XLR inputs. It's got the auxiliary and FX send. It's USB and... Recorder. Built-in recorder and it's 400 bucks. Zoom L12. YouTube.com.srtega. Yeah, so, which is even more of a monster. That thing's crazy. It's really cool. So the Zoom L12 is a digital mixer. Now we're getting crazy, but it's a little different. But it is a recorder. It's funny because it's not even Zoom talks about this. And I put it in my video, but it does that amazing thing where it's an audio interface and an onboard recorder. And why I get so excited about that is it's an onboard multi-channel recorder and multi-channel interface. I should say that's very important. Why that makes me so excited is because it gives you what I've already talked about, backup. Backup, backup, backup, right? So you're going into your software multi-channel. You're going into a recorder multi-channel. You forget to hit record. Well, you still have the software version. The software crashes. You still got the hardware version as long as you did hit record. So I like having those multiple options for sure. And here's the feature that I've not seen. I just noticed that I pulled this up. It's also Bluetooth. So I'm guessing if you want to blow your audio out to a Bluetooth speaker, I'm guessing. Yeah, or maybe you could even enter. I'm wondering if you can interface up phone. Yeah, that's interesting. No, because Gary held up a little device for the ground loop isolator. I have something similar to that, but it's an iRig 2 and it is for, yeah, Dave's holding up the original iRig 1 and the only difference between what Dave is holding, go ahead and hold that up again. It's a camera full screen. It's just a little interface that let you put a quarter inch. They're made from music. You put a guitar in there and you can put it in your smartphone, essentially. But we use it, or I use it for a mix minus to a smartphone, if you want to bring your smartphone. And that's because the auxin that's going to come out of your mixer is going to be like a line level. It's going to be hot. And there are a lot of 1 eighth inch to 3.5 millimeter, the small headphone connection, right? That you, typically the old smartphones used to have no iPhone to sell anymore, but that 3.5 millimeter connection into your smartphone is you need to be that TRS because it has the mic and headphones on one, but you can blow up, you can almost literally blow up the sound card in your phone by putting line level in there. Nick Superling and I did it. So the iRig 2, what's nice is it lets you, it takes that line level and it attenuates. And that's what, and Dave does that too. The only difference between the two and the one, well, the one you can't get anymore, they don't make it. You'll see them on Amazon, they're knockoffs. So, you know, you buy at your own risk. The two gives you a gain control on it, which I actually really like as well. So. Yeah. I'm going to try that this Saturday. I'm doing an episode of Ask the Podcast Coach. My co-host can't be there. So I'm going to wire up a phone. So if people want to call in, they can ask questions that way. So that's why I dug that out. Yeah, that lets you get a smartphone in and out. It lets you get your quality audio, basically a whole show, right? If you are bringing in, like Gary mentioned, sound effects and you're bringing in all kinds of stuff to your mixer. It just takes a bunch of sounds, puts it together. If you're bringing that in and you want the person on your phone to hear all of that, this is how, this is one way you can do that. If you're just trying to record a person on the phone, I mean, you can hack that as well by just plugging in your phone and then they can hear you through the, on port mic of the, of the. That's true too. That would be the easiest thing. I could just plug in. But they wouldn't get. They would, they would not get your nice sound, which is a more professional representation, right? If you bring a guest on, it's nice for them to have the high quality sound that you're producing. Plus they don't get any clips or sound or anything else that you want to, you know, music, anything else you want to, to. But you just brought up a great point and that, and somebody mentioned this earlier, keep it as simple as you can. When I think about, that's all I need to do is unplug what I usually do for my iPad, plug this out. Cause all I need out of my phone is the sound of the caller. That's going to go into the mixer. Right. And I'll just talk into both. I'll talk into the phone so the caller can hear me and I'll talk into the microphone so my audience can hear me and done. And now you're Steve Jobs. You're Andrew. And which is totally fine. It's all what you're comfortable with. But, you know, maybe you're doing, maybe you have an interview where you're trying to look really professional. And so giving them the high quality audio. And again, maybe you're rolling in clips that they guess or co-host actually needs to hear. So there are definite ways to do it. Super simple, super cheap. And, you know, adding in different pieces can make it, you can increase that quality, but we've also talked about how you can ruin it. How it can ruin it as well. The phone doesn't have to be a crappy phone. A phone can be Skype, but phone can be audio from other good quality sources. And that's beauty is these things are, they're fricking computers. So everything you're doing in a computer you've got in your hand. So yes, you could do Skype, you could do Google Hangout, you know, when you think about bringing someone on the phone and I try to work people down sort of that, sort of that decision tree of like, what should we go with? And they say, oh, I am my phone. Well, okay, are you on an iPhone? They say, yes, so great, let's do FaceTime because FaceTime audio is gonna be nice, high quality audio or do you have Skype or can you download Skype app on your phone, right? Like do something else before you go to the phone. But even phone itself is getting better when it comes to smartphone because I know some systems are going to like HD audio and stuff like that. So. Well, it's funny because I have somewhere in my closet an old JK audio, this little white box that actually ties into the phone with XLRs. And I was like, you know what? It's again, a lot more knobs, a lot more. And I was like, you know what? And in the end, it's not gonna sound any better. It does sound a little bit because I inquired about that quite a while ago and said, why is this thing? What's the difference? And why is it so expensive? It's doing some digital processing of the signal, I guess. So it does make it sound, it does clean up, I think, a standard phone a little better, but they're super expensive. So not always the way to go. And you can also, if the other person only has a phone, you can dial Skype, you know, you can use Skype out with a regular to a regular phone number. It doesn't mean you have to use a phone. Yeah. Cool, yeah, and so there's, you know, recording, there's gear for podcasting on the go. Now we hit on recorders and those are my favorite. I like to do stuff, mic to recorder and be done with it. You know, I'm going to record it right now. And so when I have my choice, it's mic to recorder and nothing else. That's what I was going to mention because one of the guys at our podcaster meetup showed me a cool thing that he had that goes on the end of a typical stick mic. And it looks like the module that I use for wireless. Wireless, yep. It's a recorder. Yep. Yeah, I mean, if you're going to like a conference on it, you just want to. Literally all in one hand that you're, that you got your recorder and your mic and, you know, holding it back and forth to the person you're talking to in the field and no wires, no wireless, no peripherals, anyplace else. I thought that was extra cool. Yeah. It's really a situation we need to assess. What do I really need to do? What am I trying to achieve? I'll just buy a kit. I hate kits. And kits from other podcasters are one thing. At least a lot of times you'll get close to the right gear, but kits that are put together by retailers, they make me laugh every time. Here's our podcasting kit. You're like, what is, what do you, what do you have there? I got a condenser mic, which not necessarily bad, but just stuff that just doesn't make sense half the time. Just look what's in it. I bought some lighting kits from B&H and some camera kits. And although they always had two or three things that I was never going to use, the overall price was still cheaper than I bought them all. The pieces it wasn't going to use. Yes, you have to be a good shopper. And if you go to the grocery store and you don't make sure that the bigger box of cereal is not cheaper than the smaller box of cereal, that's on you. You're a grown adult. I'm sorry for you. Did I just send all my money to B&H anyway? And then they, if I haven't bought them, why don't they send some back? They send me a little bit back and they make me think I'm getting something out of the deal, but they do get my money. They get your money. The money that you guys are like kind enough to click on my links and B&H gives me, I just give it right back to them. But thank you. It's the whole cycle of gear life. I get more gear, we show more stuff and so on and so on. That was another plug. It might have been. Almost. It may have been advertising. It was advertising. This is not sponsored. This round is not sponsored by B&H. But if you guys want to, you know. So again, well, let's think about that. I got a mic, a mixer, a print as a compressor. I'd like an EQ, to be honest with you. If I'm gonna add another piece of hardware, I don't have an EQ and that would allow me, I have EQ on a mixer. A lot of mixers have really basic EQs. I mid and low frequency and you can't always, they're not necessarily sweepable. You can't choose which frequencies they affect. But that can be nice in a live setup. Obviously I just like to twist knobs. So I would like, I have a rack here, a rack with some gear in it. And I think an EQ is what I would add, a hardware EQ, right? And I could put this audio through a virtual EQ and do something, but I'd rather just be able to turn the knobs and give it where I want and not have an extra piece of software running on the computer when I'm trying to broadcast live. Dave, what's the next piece of hardware are you thinking about adding? If anything at all. Besides a new version of the thing you already had. Yeah, I'm gonna say, well, that you mentioned that because I'm sitting here with a DBX. So I've got a gate and a compressor. And if I really wanted that big bottom and the oral exciter, they make just the oral exciter from Apex and that's like 300 bucks as opposed to a thousand. So I did see today, Art makes one. It's just, it's kind of the same thing, but it's again, you're looking at 500 bucks and it's a gate, it's a compressor. And those are, there's a few of them that are really super specific where you pick a frequency and then you pick how much you want, how wide it is. A lot of the stuff you can do in software. So, you know, for me, if I, yeah, that would be probably the next thing. If I stay where I'm at right now with my DBX and see this is where experience comes in. My brain, my heart, my, ooh, it's new. It's shiny. Wants to go back and get that oral exciter so I can get my big bottom. But I also just said 45 minutes ago that when I bought it the first time I went, you know what? It's really not that cool. It's better than it was, but it wasn't worth 300 bucks. So Dave right now needs to listen to Dave from 45 minutes ago and just say, keep your money in your pocket because you know, it's not that cool. So, but I don't know anybody that owns a 286 that goes, oh, I shouldn't have bought that. So I've already got one of those. So I think I'm gonna, I'm gonna stay, maybe get a new microphone if this has really got a problem. Right. I love the 286. I'll say before I got it, it did feel, cause you hear it all the time. It did feel like a magic bullet. Like, oh, and when I got it, I was, I don't, I wasn't immediately bowled over. I wasn't like, oh my gosh. I did not, I am curious of the stuff that you have that hardware is doing. What's the one thing that you, you wouldn't want to give up. And for me, I think, so I've got a DBX and we talked about the different things that it does. There are a lot of units. There's an MDX 4,600 in there, old, old piece in there. It's not a preamp. It does all that other stuff. I think one of the channels went out. It's Behringer. It's a little cheaper. Although Behringer generally has, has good stuff, even though it's cheap or affordable, I should say. But it's the preamp for me. I also have a Fed head. I love, I love myself a good clean preamp. And so I think most people would, a lot of people would say the gate or the expander, which I really like. But if your environment is right, and that's the key to, I think most of, most of it is recording in the right environment, but a preamp, that connection between the microphone and basically the signal that's going into your software or your audio recorder. That's what I, that's probably the most critical piece of hardware for me. I mean, I do a lot of mixer reviews and we don't go anywhere. We don't go past the preamp. The preamp's bad, we're done. We're done with that review. So Gary, what's, what's one of the things that hardware does for you that you wouldn't want to give up? Well, I actually can't give up anything because even though it's, you know, it's a six camera TV studio. It's minimal in that everything is, is doing something. But I'm, I'm wondering when you're testing a preamp, what are you hearing that, that you don't like because I've never gone for any kind of expensive preamps in my systems. The studio doesn't work out. Yeah. I'm glad you asked that. That was going to be my question. What, what makes you go, no, sorry. Like what's the test that you run through? It's easy. Dynamic mics are what we tend to use in, in podcast studios. You got the RE320, I'm sitting here in the ILPR 40, even the ATR 2100, all dynamic mics, they require a lot of gain. They don't, a lot of gain. They don't use phantom power. So they need a lot of boost to get that signal up to the signal you need. And some mixers, when you plug in a microphone like that and you crank up that preamp, because you might have to go almost close to full, especially if it's something like an SM7B, it can create its own noise. There's noise, it'll drive you insane. You're like, you won't be able to figure out why the next guy can get a clean sound out of his $340 microphone. And yours has this underground hiss, drives you crazy. And that $100 mixer shootout that I did, which is proof, it's not about money. It's not about money at all. It's about the manufacturer who's making the components. And so Bairnger has a lot of $70, $90 mixers that have excellent preamps, clean. Elisys has a lot of mixers, great. They have one mixer that very clearly adds in a substantial amount of noise to your audio. And that is no- Is that a single sample or did you try a few of them and say, it's generic to that? Yes, of course, it's the one I was sent. So a bit, it's not scientific, but I bet. I bet if you go out and get another one, that preamp just doesn't happen. Yeah, so if you go through this $70 Elisys multi-mix six and I've listened to it on the headphones and I'm not trying to be the half-million-dollar audio studio I freelance at or the NPR radio station I freelance at. I'm trying to be adequate for a... As long as it does not add noise that's not there, that's being created by the preamp itself, you're fine. Okay, I'm fine. Maybe someone else... So it's not distortion, it's not clipping. Preamp noise, I mean, okay, classic example. Everyone has the H4n from Zoom because if you're into DSLR video like I am or even a lot of podcasts and it just keeps selling like crazy because it's in so many reviews, it's in so many recommendations. I still see videos today, podcasters producing stuff, get the Zoom H4n, hey, go ahead and get the Zoom H4n, plug in your ATR 2100, get your nice minus 18, the minus 12, the minus six, whatever you want and good luck getting a clean piece of audio when you could have got an H5 or something else and set the level exactly the same and guess what, it's crystal clean and you can't figure out for the life of you why your podcast is noisy, you'll spend all those hours twisting knobs saying one, two, three, four, test, I'm at six, I'm at seven and Dave, down the road, he didn't spend any more, he just has a slightly different piece of gear, seems to be able to get a clean signal, why is that? And the Zoom H4n just doesn't have enough of the preamp. Seth, I thought the H4 was better because it wasn't the H4, which we all know was not great. They've redone the H4, it's now the H4n plus or something and it now integrates the new preamps of the Zoom H5 and H6, right? So again, again, for me, preamps are so critical and that's just me, maybe you're getting great sound out of a crappy preamp, I don't know, but for me, I don't go past the preamp if it's no good. Well, yeah, if you're hearing noise, that's, you're in a deal breaker, I just haven't run into things like that. I've got this little Elisas, which has got two mic preamps in it and the mixer is a Behringer 1622, I think, and there's four and everything's fine. The thing about the Behringer that I've discovered is because the quality of components they can afford to put in a $200 mixer is not all that great. The switches get noisy, the faders get noisy. When you say noisy, do you mean when they move them to make audios? Or they move them, the switches will crack, all the noise, the fader will. Those are things that I'm not used to seeing because I'm using. And those are some of the differences. But people, that's the thing and people wonder, like, well, why would I get this $500 one when this $100 one does the same thing? Well, those could be some of the differences. Yeah. Karen in the chatroom says, we're never really over this next thing I'm gonna upgrade to. No, right? Not if you're in this audience or not. There's a lot of podcasters who set up and go and never think about this stuff. In fact, the majority for sure. But if you're in this audience, you care enough about your podcast to listen to a show about podcasting. You probably do enjoy, not only do you, not only do you do your due diligence, you probably enjoy the gear part of it. So yes, in this crowd, there is always something next but it's part of the hobby, I think for us. What I could go to, that I'm not gonna go to because I'm television is 4K. I'm 4K. I bit the bullet from standard definition to high def with a handful of cameras. And then I bit the bullet from tape-based to SD card-based recording. So a whole nother bunch of cameras. And I'm done buying video cameras. That's one break. Yeah, 4K is not necessary. I have 4K, but the major benefit to 4K right now, for me is recomposing shots. You can get two cameras out of one camera. So I shoot a lot of 4K and the video ends up on YouTube as 2.5K or 1080. And I'm getting two shots because you can crop in with zero loss of resolution. That's a great thing. That is something a solo producer can use to their advantage. So for me, that's the big advantage to 4K right now. When I used to do it with 1080, I would do 1080 and 720, but put 720 out on a MacBook that's got a 5K resolution screen on it and you're like, what am I looking at here? So yeah, I mean, the tech pushes us sometimes, but yes, there's a lot of things that are very unnecessary. A lot of the gear that we're talking about is not necessarily necessary for podcasts. I mean, not to be confused. People will hear rounds like this and they'll think, oh my God, you know. A podcaster doesn't have to have all that gear. You're right, they don't. It's all about the way you wanna work. It's all about easier workflows sometimes or convenience or you can spend 70 bucks and get a fantastic sounding podcast that is on par with this. You might not be able to do everything that some of this gear can do or you may have to find alternative ways to do it, which may be a little jankier. You might be holding your phone up to your ear and talking in your microphone at the same time, which is fine, it's fine. So all on how you wanna work. And my next show is gonna be audio-based. I'll do a video on YouTube just because I've got all the television stuff, but the audience will be mostly audio. Yeah, that's where the audience is anyways, at least in podcasting. You wanna be a YouTuber, it's a different story, but yes, this show is done live via video only because we can't. I mean, we're using the tech to bring in multiple people, right? This is another case of, oh, I wanna bring in multiple people. Well, I'm mixing down, everyone that's connected to me remotely, you guys, you're being mixed down to one channel and that has a disadvantage. But for production of this show, it works out great. And I've recorded in a way that is good quality. I mean, the audio that I'm getting now from you guys live is significantly better. It's fantastic compared to what you will get from the archived compressed version of YouTube. If you had to rip that audio file out, it's gonna be significantly degraded, so. You could tell if you do it AB, but if you're just listening to it, it'll sound fine. Right, again, most of this is for you, but that said, like I said, at this point in 2018, I don't differentiate between quality of production and quality of, that's an interesting call. Pick that up, but anyways, quality of production and quality of content. I don't separate, I'm done with it. Like I never have, but I don't wanna hear the conversation anymore because again, it takes some time to learn your gear and that's it because it doesn't take money. It takes a little tiny investment, any investment you're gonna make in any hobby to sound as good because you are in a space where there is a lot of good sounding stuff. And people are, it's like a great movie. If you notice the editing, you're pulled out of the story. If I'm busy listening to the ground loop in your audio, I'm pulled out of your story. So I don't differentiate between quality of content and quality of production. I think they need to be the same, that they are the same. I think they affect each other. I had a review to show on Wednesday's podcast rodeo show and this guy had a really cool intro. I mean, a great opening of the show. Here's what we're gonna get into, everything's great. And when it finally got to him, I'm gonna guess Blue Yeti at least two feet away from his mouth. I was jokingly, you said, is this guy even in the same room as his microphone? Cause it was just sounded like he was a mile away. And so some of this, like you said, it's you have to spend time with the equipment so that you can get the best sound out of it because I watched a guy today. He was doing a video podcast and he had whatever microphones they were, they're probably condenser. And again, that doesn't necessarily mean they're bad. They had pop filters, but they were literally an easy foot from each microphone. And so there was just a ton of room noise. And I was like, you know, that's not a bad setup, but everybody's got to get closer and, you know, learn a little mic technique. That's it. It's how you use it, right? Blue Yeti's fine if you know how to use it. Rob from Libs and uses a Blue Yeti and his podcast sounds fantastic. It's not, it's about learning how to use the gear that you are producing. Foot or two from a mic isn't a bad thing in and of itself if the room is quiet. Because the studio, again, the studios that are working in the pro studios, dead silent rooms. And we never let the talent get closer than a foot to the mic. We don't want any proximity effect. We want them clean and natural and we'll add whatever we want afterwards. But this room that I'm in here, you're going to hear computers running and fans and traffic outside. If I don't sit two inches from the mic and stay right close. And there, by the way, you get your free big bottom from the proximity effect. That's it. Yeah, this was in somebody's kitchen. You could hear, if you listen closely, you could hear the TV in the other room. It was just like, yeah, not hard to fix but they were just a little too far away and just a little tweaking. They could have had a much better audio. Yeah, exactly. One of the hardest things I have to do when I'm doing field stuff with guests is keep them up on the microphones. In a conference room, I'll bring in a showroom where there's hundreds and hundreds of people and they're all babbling. And I'll have PR40s on everybody so I've got as narrow an audio field as I can but they're wandering back and back and back and back. And I'll put headphones on everybody so we can hear each other and it doesn't seem to matter. They think the mic is going to bite and two or three times during the show. Come on up on that microphone a little bit. It's a lot of this motion, hand pulling towards me like, come up, come up. There's a lot of miming going on in a brand new... And a lot of the podcasts that I listen to, I hear the same thing that they're back off the mic. In a room that is got, it's too live and they just don't understand and all the meetups when people are asking, you know, what are some of the techniques? It's this, this is one of them for those of you that are watching the video. We're all three to five inches from the mic at most. Yeah, and that's it. I mean, that's at the beginning of, it's a good way to start to head out here at the beginning and talked about, you know, gear and hardware for podcasters as opposed to studios. Like the typical podcaster is not going to be in a studio. They're going to be in a extra bedroom or garage or something, you know, or the car, something that's not made necessarily for recording audio. So there are things you need to do, which again is just learning that hardware. And my technique is a huge one of those. Getting close to the microphone and then understanding what that also does. Gary said proximity effects. So getting too close can be really money. So and pop filters, if you have that or wind screens, whatever, you have to know what that does. There's like, there's a push and pull there like get close, but you need to be aware of this other stuff. So yep, it is just about learning to use the gear. If you're going to make that investment, we've talked about, when you need to talk about that much hardware and that was kind of my point is that there are a few things that you can add into a podcast studio, a mixer or an audio interface, maybe a little processing. In this case, we talked about couple items that did compression and de-essing and gates kind of all in one unit. Recorders, audio recorder, some big fan of those. And it just matters how you're going to produce a podcast. Are you going to be with someone on Skype? Is all your interviews going to be remote? You know, what do you need for that? What's your setup? And we talked, you know, could be USB, the only hardware could be the microphone. And we definitely need that. We all need at least one, I guess two pieces of hardware. Actually, you could just have one. You could have your phone, yes, you can record into your phone and have a whole podcast. But when you're done, it's up to you. You can do it. And actually you can make it sound good. I did a podcast into my phone on the high-speed train in Europe because that's all I had to record on and I wanted to interview my wife about our trip. There you go. It wasn't as good as this, but it was perfectly adequate for what it was. Sure, especially you're talking about it, you're on a train. So there is some environmental sound that you actually want to that. So that can actually mask a lot of maybe the problems that you would have. If you, even if you took that phone into like a regular, a quiet room, but you might notice more problems than you would and say on like a train, if obviously you're setting the stage. It was just lower fidelity. There wasn't much wind. Got a little bit of breath noise because I wasn't hearing what it was. Right, there you go. That's one of the things. Headphone amplifiers. You know, one thing you want to do about when you're recording is to monitor your audio, right? So you can catch all those issues in real time, but what did that remind me of? I said head to a phone amplifier. What did I just say? Well, I was going to say a piece that I would show you if I was over in the other room is the headphone amp is from a company called Head Amp, H-E-A-D-A-M-P. It's a simple one stereo in, four stereo out. The advantage is that everybody listening on their headphones gets to set their own volume level and that's all it does. But I don't have volume wars between my guests. They can all set their own volume. Right here, I got Shone's L, I have one too. I got the cord wrapped around it, but here you go. It's a little Behringer. What is this? Yep. H8400, I wanted to get this for a long time. You plug in your outputs, or you plug in one output and then everyone else can have a control over their own volume here. And this is nice. If you're in studio with multiple people, you want to be able to give them their own control so they can hear the audio at the level that they enjoy. This is okay. Everyone raves about, they're like, oh, it's really clean. Yeah, it's pretty clean. I'd say about 70% of the preamp is clean and it starts to get introduced a little bit of noise. Which again, preamp problems is a noisy headphone preamp is also going to ruin something for me. Because, hey, when you're trying to monitor your audio and you're trying to hear what you're capturing and is it clean? And if it's coming from the headphone preamp, you're going to think it's going to sound like that's in the recording. So you don't know, is it from the headphone preamp or is it from the audio signal and do I need to make an adjustment? So I bought a really expensive Zoom F8 and their headphone amp sucks. So the mix pre that we talked about, that one actually has a nice clean headphone preamp. So that can be important too. I'm trying to remember why I even thought about the headphone preamp and people monitoring their own audio. But that is an important piece of hardware, headphones. Monitoring your audio. You want to catch problems as they occur so you can fix them in real time. Wasn't the point I was going to make, but it's a good point. It's a good point. Yeah, that's nothing worse than listening back to something you just recorded for 45 minutes and going, oh, I didn't realize I couldn't hear him. Well, right now, I mean, I'm listening. So one of the things people do wrong is they monitor the audio but they monitor the wrong source. Always monitor at the recording source. So in this case, I could monitor out of the, what's coming out of the computer, the head, the interface. I'm monitoring at the recorder where I want. And if the audio stopped because the SD card got full, the battery failed or it just crashed, I would know that because I'd stop hearing myself, I'd stop hearing you and I immediately would panic and I'd go over to the audio recorder and I'd fix it. So that can be important as well. Sadly, I use Wirecast for my video switching and recording and I can't listen to the Wirecast because it's got a lot of latency. Yes, that is the- So I'm letting myself come back late. So I'll listen to it just to make sure everything is clean but then I've got to cross my fingers for the rest of the show. Yes, that is an advantage of hardware as well because you can get, you know, if you go through a computer, even like a, if you're going into software, say through an audio interface and you want to monitor that audio and I'm talking about recording and monitoring the source. So you can do a lot of them have switches. You can do direct monitoring, what's lets you hear exactly what's going into the audio interface and what you're not hearing is the recording. Something could happen between the audio interface and the recording, right? Something in the computer. So what's nice in that situation, you definitely want to check the recording, see if that is where you want it to be. And then if you want no, you know, no latency, latency is just your voice will come back to you. Good luck talking when you hear yourself back. It's amazing. Like you can't make your mouth move. It's, it's incredible. I'm just being the engineer of course. I'll only listen to what's actually been recorded. And back in the tape days, I'll listen to the head that they put in the professional recorders that follows the record head unless you listen immediately to what's being recorded. So I'd always do that. But as the combo talent, you got to hear something. Although for folks who have a stuttering problem, feeding back your audio delayed slightly has shown for some people to have helped solve that. Interesting. So if there's any podcasters out there who have a stuttering problem, which is sort of a kind of a deal breaker, give that a try. It's interesting. That one, that one I have not heard. So cool. Always learning something new, especially from the guest. Not much from the host here. There's nothing new. It's the same old stuff. 106 rounds of the same. Work guy. I learned so much. Yes, Dave. Yeah, that's it. I mean, he's got plenty to share. Dave, what are you on like episode 600, something now or something crazy? 600, yeah, I don't. Three, I think is this week. I don't know where it comes from. Amazing. Somebody asked me the other day how many podcasts I've actually started. And I went back and counted because most of them are not around anymore. But I've started 33. If we count Bernie, if we count Bernie, the cat that was 33. I'll count. So yeah, I was going to say that that's another accessory that any studio absolutely needs is lots and lots of cats. Yeah, absolutely. Lots of animals, children, children are great accessories. So all all great audio sources. All right, well, as we head out, Dave, why don't you tell us what that fantastic show is or one of your 33 that you'd like to plug? There's only like seven left. Schoolofpodcasting.com is where you can find most of my stuff. Everybody at the at the meetups. I don't know if there's meetups for podcasters in other cities, but I found one here about two years ago. And they all talk about you and David and Daniel and Daniel. Yeah. And when everyone says, well, how do I go learn how to do this? Because we always have a new a newbie or two that are they heard about it. They want to go do it, but they have no idea how. And we point them to you guys and say, like, go learn that and then get your gear and come back and we'll help you figure it out. Awesome. Thank you. Go to meetup.com, search your city, put in podcasting, see what's out there. I mean, literally how I have a career in podcasting is through local meetup groups. So my city has one. A lot of cities around me have one. Dave, you guys, you have one. Anyohiopodcasters.com. Yeah, exactly. So yes, check your city if you're wondering. It is so much fun. I mean, you get to do this in person. Harris has a little bit of hubris because it's called the North Carolina podcasters meetup, but it's in Raleigh. And it's if you're North Carolina is 500 miles wide, you could be you could be six hours of driving away from our meetup just because we call it North Carolina. Nice. Well, you know, until someone else comes in and decides they want to split it in half with you. We get we get somebody from from 120 miles away. Wow. It comes dedication. All right. Well, Gary, where can we find your podcast? At the moment, it is Ham Radio Now at hamradionow.tv. And again, I'm handing that off to my cohost and it will be firing up something called the Triangle Talk Show because it's the cleverest name I could come up with with a URL I could buy. There you go. Talkshow.com. But it's not it's probably going to start in a few weeks. And I'll be a again, I'm an old time radio guy, and it will be an old time radio show that occasionally swears. Nice. I like it. Freedom of podcasting. All right. Well, podcastersroundtable.com, of course, for all the archives and to sign up, podcastersroundtable.com, slash guests. If you would like to be a guest, you'll get into a little form there. When you sign up to email list, it'll say what what do you want to talk about? And when we get a few of the same thing, we'll put together around and we'll have fun talking about it. All right, we'll see you for round 107 in a couple of weeks, something like that. But goodbye. See you guys.