 and time for more tech talk. But before we get into that, we need to remind people that if they need help with their home voiceover studio, if you wanna learn a lot more, you're starting from scratch, if you are an established pro making billions of dollars because it's been promised to all of you out there that the voiceover world is paved with gold, some of you who happen to be doing that, you still need to have your home voiceover studio. It is a must in 2018, 2019 and forward. And there's only two guys who have created, curated, fixed, maintained, and tuned to absolute perfection in the world that know how to do it. That's you and me, right? That's right, man. Okay, good. Your turn to do some hyperbole here. Towardsthetech.com is where you find me on the web. I can be booked for real time services where we're on the phone or on Zoom or something, or you can send me in files for what I call more of a virtual engineering self service kind of thing. And it's, I can design your studio, I can tell you why your mic's buzzing, all that stuff right over there at GeorgeTheTech.com. And Dan is over at homevoiceoverstudio.com. And I offer very similar services. I am a full-time voice actor. I am not the big-time engineer that you are. But I've built a whole bunch of these studios. I look at it from the voice actor's perspective. The real world. The real world. Yes, and so I know a bit or two about what it's supposed to sound like. Right. And whistle. See, now you know what that means. And how do you say that? I wanna whistle. Feel free. You can be the bed to this particular thing. And you can send me a file at homevoiceoverstudio.com. All you gotta do is click on the specimen collection cop at the bottom of the homepage. And I will, for 25 bucks, I will analyze your audio, see if it's right. And occasionally, I talk to you about it. That's right. We will occasionally bounce thing off. If one of us gets stumped, we'll bounce it off the other. We had a cool one last week. That was like, what is that? I was close, wasn't I? You were, you were. That was the Wi-Fi thermometer. The thermometer, yes. And I think that was Simon Vance's studio. Yeah, all of a sudden it went, bzzz. Every 60 seconds. Every 60 seconds, it was like, some Bluetooth thing is trying to find its mate. Yeah, I was close. It was a Wi-Fi thing. And he got a signal. Yeah, it's a Wi-Fi thing. And Simon figured that out on his own amazingly. Well, he's a smart guy. Anyway, we've got a bunch of tech questions for our expertise coming right up here, and we'll start off with Cole Niblett. She says, or he says, I was hoping you could help me understand latency and buffer size a little better. I recently purchased an Audient ID for and have the option to set the latency and buffer size. I started out selecting a variety of different combinations. And to my ears, I couldn't hear much of any difference. I'm running a PC, Windows 7, and Reaper is my DAW. It is the automatic setting, the best option, or how do you find the right settings for my setup? Tons of thanks in advance. Cole, well, first off, my media thought is, who are you listening to? You know, a lot of people, headphones on, headphones off. That has to do with latency, but what you thought of that. Yeah, that's the monitoring side of it. Yeah, so it's funny that I can't remember the last time this question came up. And here it is. You know, so I'm glad we're covering what seems to me new ground here on this particular topic. But the latency and the buffer are related to each other. The larger the buffer, the longer the latency. Well, what's the latency we're talking about anyway? That's the time it takes for your voice to go into the microphone, get recorded into the computer, and then make its way back through the computer, through the interface to your headphones. That's the latency. So why do we as voice actors have to worry about latency? Well, we basically don't. We don't need to monitor ourselves. So if you really have to monitor yourself, you should not be monitoring what comes out of the DAW. You should be monitoring what comes out of the interface. That's why like the mixer, you're hearing the sound right off the mixer. If you're on a Scarlett 2i2, there's a direct monitor button. When you press that, it's literally an audio feed that goes from your mic into your headphones. Make sure your speakers are off. And your speakers have to be off, feedback central. So that latency really only is relevant for musicians who are doing overdubbing and doing multi-track recording. So they actually are really concerned about latency. They wanna make sure that when they punch in a recording or they play over top something else, that the two fit together without any weird delays. They don't wanna have to shift the audio over to line it up later. So they really care about latency. Also, anybody that uses virtual instruments, in other words, hey, you hit a key on a synthesizer, you wanna hear that sound come back as fast as possible. You don't wanna need to lay. That's where latency is super critical. So you'll hear people talk about Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt's awesome, we get three milliseconds of latency. It's not relevant for us, it really doesn't matter. As long as your audio is recorded without clicks and pops, dropouts and things, you're good and probably automatic is fine. All right. So just stick with automatic or whatever the default is, unless otherwise directed by your doctor. Right, and Cole, if it's working for you. Yeah, it sounds good, it is good. It is good, exactly right. Paul Stefano, the one that only asks, I have an Apollo Twin Solo wired through a Belkin Thunderbolt dock. Okay, very specific. Whenever the monitor goes to sleep and I try to bring it back, the monitor stays black. I have to unplug the Apollo or PowerCycle to bring the Mac back up. Sometimes nothing works and I have to reboot. Okay. That one happens, I've seen that one happen. But a lot of people have been talking about how the Apollo is affecting things. Yeah, I haven't heard of that one, but I can tell you that anytime you're using any kind of a hub thing, dock hub. Don't use a hub. Docks and hubs are very persnickety. Like they're really, cause there's a lot going on. You have a Thunderbolt connection going to a box. And then that box takes that Thunderbolt and converts it to everything else. Ethernet, audio, video, HDL, all these different things. The USB, and it's trying to do the best it can and not cause any issues. But sometimes they cause problems and this is one of those cases. I haven't used a ton of different Thunderbolt docks. The ones I've had the most success with and still not perfect always, but the most success have been from maxsales.com. That's otherworld, OWC, otherworld computing. I think their stuff's pretty dang rock solid. But that's probably what you're dealing with here. You're just dealing with a pesky issue where the dock is getting in the way of things. So try a different dock, perhaps. That might be something you might want to try. Because he doesn't have the right entry on his computer. Well yeah, if he's using a Thunderbolt computer that has one Thunderbolt port. Yeah. And you have a Thunderbolt interface and a monitor that also needs to be plugged in. You run out of ports pretty fast. A dock like that becomes important. So the routing traffic on there is sort of like the 405 around Wilshire Boulevard at about five o'clock. It can be. I mean Thunderbolt's fast, but the hub has to be able to keep up. Right. He also has a bone conduction headphones. Have you guys tried them for live directions? Seems like a perfect solution to avoid bleed through into the mic on a live session. Have you played with one of those? I haven't played with one of those. A while ago I mentioned this. I think I have one at home in a drawer somewhere. Right. It's called Aftershocks. Right. A-F-T-E-R-S-H-O-K-C-K-Z or something. They have a Z on the end. Right. Yeah, so instead of going over the ear like regular headphones, they go like behind the head and they actually press like right here on your jaw. Right. Like this. And so they just, they send audio into the jaw. But they also unfortunately radiate sound themselves. Right. They're not totally silent. So if you're playing back something pretty loud, you hear the sound come right out of the, right out of the actual transition. That's gonna be like the phone thing we had last week. Don't use the phone. It's almost like an open-ear, open-ear headphone. They were designed for people to be able to ride, jog, whatever, bike in traffic outside safely and still hear everything around them, which is what they're doing. But unfortunately, I think because of that reason, there's too much bleed. They don't really work as well as I would have hoped. All right. And Rob McGuire, that's a question. Yes. If you have a choice of soundproofing a garage or building a booth inside it, what would you recommend in which would be more economical? The garage already is well built and fairly quiet, but it's in LA. Enough said. Well, that was the first thing that I would ask is, boy can get hot in your garage. Oh my God. Not the best place. I can love it. Yeah. Depending on which direction the door is facing too. Right, true. Facing south, I mean, you could cook eggs in there. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Big cookies and stuff. That's true. So he's saying which would be more economical? Which one, what is it comparing? Garages? Oh, soundproofing or building? Well, building a booth in the garage is way more economical. Yeah. It's way cheaper to build a little three by five box. A closet. It is to soundproof an entire room. A 18 by 20 foot garage. Way cheaper. So that's a no-brainer yet. Building a booth is much cheaper. Then you can, if you build a booth quiet enough, then you can get like a portable air conditioner for 300 bucks. Pipe it in there with through some baffles. And you can keep that little box cool enough to work in all year round. Yeah, I've been seeing those little air conditioners over at Home Depot. They have a conduit, you gotta run it out a window and stuff. They do, they have to exhaust the heat somewhere. If you're in a garage, the heat's gonna exhaust into the garage. The garage and then it's gonna be 400 degrees in there. Right, right. But be able to make a roast in there. The thing is it doesn't work as efficiently because it's taking in hot air and trying to cool that hot air. Versus if it was inside your house, it's circulating the cool air. So your mileage may vary, but sometimes they work okay. Alrighty. Well, good luck. If you got questions for us that you would like to repeat it on this show and have us take a shot at the answer, you can email us at theguysatvobs.tv and we are happy to answer those questions on this very show just as we demonstrated tonight. Mm-hmm. All right.