June 23, 2025 • 38 mins
This week on The Pro Audio Suite, we're diving deep into a topic that sparks endless debate (and confusion) in VO forums everywhere: the noise floor. What does "-74 dB" even mean if you don't know how it was measured? And why are voice actors obsessing over numbers that might not matter?
Join AP, Robbo, George The Tech, and Robert Marshall as they break down:
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What noise floor really is (and what it isn't)
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Why context, weighting, and window size matter
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RMS vs Peak vs LUFS – and why it all depends
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How your mic, preamp, plugins, and power can mess with your readings
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Whether your studio noise is actually a problem or just sounds nice
We even talk about whether it's OK to use a high-pass filter, what settings to use, and why some mics (looking at you, TLM 103) are just better at hearing ghosts.
If you’ve ever been told “your studio needs to be -60 dB or else,” this episode will save you some sleepless nights.
🎧 Thanks to our sponsors:
TriBooth – Use the code TRIPAP200 to get $200 off your TriBooth.
Austrian Audio – Making passion heard
🔗 Links
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Join the conversation: https://www.facebook.com/groups/357898255543203
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Learn more: https://www.proaudiosuite.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Y'all ready?
Be history. Get started.
Welcome.
Hi. Hi. Hi.
Hello, everyone, to the pro audio suite.
These guys are professional and motivated.
Please take the video.
Stars George Wisdom, founder of SourceElement Robert Marshall, international
audio engineer Darren RobinRoberts, and global voice Andrew Peters.
Thanks to tribal Austrian audio,maging passionate elements
(00:21):
George the tech wisdom and Rob and APIsinternational demos.
To find out more about us.
Check the Proteassweetcorn line up. Ready?
Here we go.
I'm here with meand welcome to another pro audio suite.
Thanks to tribus.
Don't forget the code.
Trip up to 100 to get $200
off your plosive again and Austrian audio.
(00:44):
I have to say, I just did it again.
Those plosives, the hunt,the hot property, the place of zero.
Dear, oh dear, oh, dear.
Very noisy.
And speaking of noise, that's whatwe're going to talk about today is noise.
Basically new studio.
And it's something that, I getwe talk about the stadium noise.
(01:06):
I have no noise that drives on that noise,like rotten and things, but yeah,
not random impacts or plosivesor dull noise in your system.
Noise floor noise.
Noise floors,I think is the word for this.
Yeah, indeed.
Really annoying noise. Yes.
So. So when somebody talksabout their noise floor,
they always throw a number out.
I see in every Facebook group
(01:26):
my noise, myself noiseor my my room tone or my sound.
The where I see a lot,my sound -eight inches.
So yeah, yeah, yeah.
By my sound floorI see that one all the time is -74.
Right.
And they'll just that's the number period.
Right.
First of all,
what does it mean when so many mentionedthe sound floor or noise floor
(01:48):
or whatever terminology they mean.
What does it mean.
Well I don't know.
See this is the thingbecause if you're talking about noise off
your microphone, isn't it going to dependon how much gain you've got on the mic
and all that sort of stuff?
I mean, how what a noise floor of minuswhatever means jack sheet,
depending on how much it's all relative,it's all relative
to the performance volumethat you're putting into it.
(02:11):
So the signal or yeah, the signal to noiseratio is the thing.
Right.
So if you're recording a whisperand you're always recording stuff
that's whispering your noise, flooris way more critical than if you are doing
video games and always yelling, yeah,because your preamp can be turned down.
And now the ratio betweenwhat you are interested
in, the yelling, the whispering,or in the case
(02:32):
yelling is a lot louder than the noisethat's inherent in your booth.
And so now you want the biggest difference
between the signal you wantand the signal you don't want.
And so it's so it's it is a ratio really.
But it's not expressed as a ratiois it George.
It is expressed in decibelsor a negative number.
And and is it Rmse.
(02:52):
Is it a lot smaller.
Is it a peak. It what is the numberand what is its weighting.
And there's so many other ways to dowe measure that.
And doesyour software know the difference.
And does the person that's asking youthe number know what any of this stuff
means. Exactly.
And this is a way
that microphone companies use to hidethe weenie can confuse people.
Microphone work a lot
(03:14):
higher spec than it might be,especially when it comes to the weighting.
The weightings are can be very confusing.
Yeah, you might see a weighting or seeweighting.
Those are the two.
Most common is that there is no Bweighting.
It's always A and C whatever.
Is itC that emulates the human hearing curve.
Like the sensitivityto low versus AI frequencies.
(03:36):
So it's C weighting is I always get thisI think
I think they're both based on the FletcherMunson curve with Fletcher Munson.
Yeah.
But Fletcher,neither of us are saying that correctly.
Is that what you getwhen you've had a couple accounts?
The Fletcher Munchen aa weighting mimics the human hearing
and C weighting is less selective.
C is more is more,let's just say more broad
(03:57):
and probably more sensitiveto low frequency.
Right.
So that's the less forgivingand and high frequency too,
because the Fletcher Munson curveis it's your smiley face.
Right.
So it's your sad face, right.
That you see weighting is less forgiving.
It's it.
So what happens isit's in everybody's software.
They they hit record.
They get the room tone right.And they hit stop.
(04:20):
And then they analyze itsomehow, like because somebody asked them,
what's the self?
What is the noise floor of your studio?
That's that's what everybody is askedyou know, as an actor and voice actor,
what is the noise for pure studio noisefor my studio when my preamp turned off
is, you know, exactly what does it mean,where what noise are we measuring?
(04:41):
We've got so many sources of noise.
We have this the noise that emanatesfrom the microphone, from the preamp,
maybe somewhere else down the signalchain, some plug in.
You have some plugins createa plug in that you might have for waves.
Waves.You got to turn it off. That's right.
Literally be careful.
Everyone out there waves
literally has like 60 cycle noisebecause somehow that's vintage compressor.
(05:01):
You can dial in noise if you want to.
Yeah, absolutely. An agedelay. Same thing.
Yeah okay.
Here's a question there.
So if I'm if I'm recordingor AP by the way and and I can
I mean I know exactly and I come inI've actually captured 4824
and I'm peaking at around about -18.
(05:23):
Okay.
Which is that's pretty low. Pretty low.
So pretty low.
If I capture that leveland I send that off,
what is going to happenwhen they start compressing.
They're going to turn it up.
So so you by peaking at -18 you have nothelped your signal to noise ratio
because you have 18dB
(05:43):
of space between those two that you've notused. Yep.
Okay. Right.
But does you need to use all 18. No.
Because then you risk hitting the wall.
So but you want to be more at like minussix maybe at least minus ten minus three.
You start to sweat, you know,
where's the sweet spot?
I always try to get people to come insomewhere between -12 and -6.
(06:06):
I think that's the yellow rangeon most matters.
And I always say, if you're in the yellow,let it mellow.
All right. That's right. Yeah. I
if you're
always in the green, it's a little lean.
Because again, that's, that's my,that's my little monitor.
So, so yeah.
You can turn your preamp upand assuming that, you know, like that's
(06:26):
going to pull the noise fromthe preamp will be less of an issue then,
but then that will pull upall the background noise with it.
Because if you think about it, the noise,the volume
of your voice relative tothe noise of the room is a constant.
Yeah, you're never going to change that.
And if your preamp was perfect,then recording at -18
(06:48):
wouldn't make a differencebecause it would all raise up in ratio.
But by having your preampat the right level,
you're at least getting the most outof your signal to noise
ratio of the preamp and the microphoneitself.
You're optimizingyour signal path or signal chain.
You're getting the best resolutionthat your preamp can provide.
You're getting the best sensitivityyour microphone can provide.
(07:10):
So those things are the D converter.
Yeah.
So those are all essentially takenout of the equation.
If you're if your gearis of decent quality,
the sound you hear in that room tonewhen you hit play and you listen
99% of the time, probably not the mic
probably not the preamp, it'sprobably the environment, right?
(07:30):
Yeah. But what sort of mikesare we talking about that make noise?
I mean, tubemics obviously will create noise.
Yeah. Dynamic mics. Here.
Let me, let me give you guysa really good example.
Wait a minute.
Dynamic Mike does a dynamicMike make noise?
I don't know that it makes noise.
It just makes it makes the preamp workharder. Yes.
Yeah, but I think I havea good mic example here. And
sorry Austrian audio.
(07:52):
We're going to, we're going to I'mnot on an Austrian audio mic right now.
So what's it doing here if we're trying todemonstrate bad, bad stuff.
Not good.
I was working quick and I didn'tI didn't, like, give it up.
So basically, here's a kind of a batterypowered condenser mic.
So this is now the boom on my headset.
(08:12):
Too much gain, by the way.
21 seconds. Awesome. Forever.
Yeah, yeah. That's right. Exactly.
But when I, when I come back on this,you're going to hear the,
the noise floor of just, All right, now,do you hear the difference in this one
at all? Yeah, a whole lot less level.
Level? Yeah, a lot less level. Right.
Let's say in theory we do because we'regoing to hear the raw audio in the post.
(08:34):
But right now we're hearing the,the you're hearing, which is like noise.
Right.
And so because the levels less in orderto bring it up than I have to hit,
you know, bring my preamp upand then up goes all that noise.
Yeah. Right.
Right.
And, and even the electronic noisein this case.
So for a voice over a microphone of,of, of a higher sensitivity
(08:56):
or maybe the highest possible sensitivitytheoretically
is the best microphonefor a voice over the road.
Ntg five.
This is a very modern, very new mic.
It's only been around for a few years.
First thing I noticed with thatMike is it's high.
The highest output Mike had ever used.
It was like shockingly hot.
That would be good.
That means that you could plug thatinto any old cheap audio interface
(09:20):
which only has like a Scarletttwo i2 Gen two that has 48 DB of gain.
I still think you're rightand wrong, right?
I think you're right and wrongbecause there's still the concept of self
noise on the microphone.
So the microphone could have a lotof output, but still a lot of self noise.
There's one minus.
If you had a low output micwith a really clean preamp,
(09:42):
the Ntg five is pretty quietthough I was using it last week.
I had to work up at my parents placeand I took it with me.
Yeah, it's pretty quiet.
Yeah. So low self noise, high output.
You got a really great Mike.
There's one microphonethat a lot of people use and I like it too
that it stands in for 416 all the time.
The 41 six.
And this is the 87 five. Yeah.
(10:04):
The AudioTechnica 875 are it's a really bargain mic
and it sounds really nice,but that is its biggest Achilles heel.
It is.
It is a noisy.
Yeah.We tested it a couple of weeks ago. Right.
Yeah. Yeah.
Is that the one we used?
Yeah. Noise is noticeable. Yeah.
And and even switchingbetween this Audio-Technica
and this boom mic I can hear the noisedifference is switching between these two.
(10:25):
Because even though this boom micsounds like calling all cars,
I can hear the hiss difference.
It's clean. It's.
Yeah.
The mic you're wearing on your headsetlooks like just a standard headset.
Nobody knows thatthat's actually a $1,500 microphone.
Yeah. Underneath that foam ball.
That's it's
just that this thing is a $1,500 micand it it is definitely very clean.
It just has a horrible EQ curve meantto make it over the top of a race car.
(10:49):
Right.
It's for, you know, reporters on the trackreporting.
Yeah. Covering. Exactly.
So what can we recommendas best practice, then, for that voice
actorwho's being asked to tell the report back
what my studio's actual noisesor the noise level of my studio?
I mean, I said,you answer a question with a question.
(11:11):
I would say that to just be like,what rating would you like?
Would you like the noisefor, expressed in peak or Rmse,
which is somethingthat we should just talk about right away?
Okay. Let's talk about the differencebetween those two.
And they're quite can be quite diff.
So basically it's the difference betweenthe instant level and the loudest content.
Yeah that's right. Yeah.
Or the average level Rmse is average.
(11:32):
And peak is instantlywhat's happening right now.
So you could have a right.
So you could have a high noiseor your noise floor expressed in the peak
level would theoretically be higheror worse,
a worse set, a worse number
then the Rmse or the average,because you're going to have an average.
Okay.
Here's another questionthen based on Twisted Wave,
(11:55):
I'm looking at twisted wave on my screenas we speak.
And on the right hand side there is itsays the level meter
and it says Rmse at the bottom.
So is that meter on twistedwave an Rmse or a peak?
Make sure the Rmse, it's an arm's meter.
Well it's right.
So in Rmsemeter is more like a view meter.
(12:16):
It's an averaging meter. Yeah. It's both.
So the number at the top of that viewmeter
is a peak momentary number.
And the bottom number at the bottom ofthe twist wave meter is the Rmse reading.
Okay. So it shows you both at allthe time. Right. Okay.
Which is kind of him I wish I wish AdobeAudition would do that.
(12:36):
It's really frustratingthat audition does not show you,
Rmse or loss metering.
Now you can get plug ins.
And what's a good free one?
You mean,is that the free? Yeah, that's the one.
Everything is a free one.
That's I yeah, it's perfectly good enough.
And easy to licenseand tells you what you need to do.
Yeah. Right.
And one thing, one thing to be clearis that like loves and
(12:59):
okay, FS are a version of averaging,but they are over time.
Well and also they're,
they're frequency dependentbecause they're very much voice oriented
because they're directedat dialog normalization for program
for TV and whatnot.
So they are an averagebut they also weight it.
And we talked about that earlier.
The weighting is like applyingan EQ curve to the measurement
(13:21):
so that you're focusing on a certainfrequency range so to speak.
So lots and also they have a timing to it.
The timing of the averageis a little bit different.
Well that's the thing. So this isI wanted to get into that too.
There's so many different aspectsabout measuring noise.
So you're in twist a wave at AP.
You hit you hit your file menu
and drop downand you'll find something called analyze.
(13:43):
This is going to give youmuch more useful information because it's
going to give you first of all, it'sgoing to analyze the entire file,
whatever it is.
If it's an hour long it'sgoing to look at the whole file.
Now you can select a tiny bit of itand analyze it.
But generally we analyze the whole thing.
And now you're goingto get all this information.
And you may see a peak amplitude of -17.
(14:05):
In my case based on the last fileI just recorded and edited,
it has a peak of zero DB,because at some point it was a transient
loud noise by melaughing or snapping into and it hit zero.
And then I see, I see laughs,which is what Robert was talking about.
That's that average level calculationthat's weighted based on hearing.
(14:25):
And it's you said it's more voicecentric, right, Robert.
Yeah, yeah.
Because it's for TV programing.
And then below that I see average Rmse.
So now I see two numbers, both of themmeasuring essentially an average level.
But in this case very different readings.
The love's is at -20 almost -27
(14:47):
and the Rmse is -35.
So now what numbersare we looking at here?
I mean we're measuring noise, right?
So if someone asks youwhat your noise floor is
you got to ask them,how do you want me to report this to you?
Because if not, almost less is more.
And, you know,if you had to report back to them,
(15:07):
then you give them an average number.
That's always going to look, look better.
And probably the, the,
the one based on lovesis probably the one that looks the best.
And I guess maybe. Yeah.
I mean, in this case, so,so then you also have minimum arms.
So in twist Away there's essentially whatis the sustained minimum average level.
(15:30):
And that essentially gives youyour noise floor
essentially againassuming your peak is at zero right.
So my opinion is is take that file.
Bring it.
So the peaks are at zeronormalized to zero.
Then do this measurement.
And when you look at that minimum RMS,which is how loud the noise is
(15:51):
at a sustained period of time,that to me is the most honest
possible measurement of what ain a pure in a pure recording.
Once you once you figure out
the mic preamp setting for yourpeaked or normalized setting,
and you
say, okay, so normalizing it,I have to bring it up by
six DB or whatever, you can almostjust do the calculation in your head.
(16:13):
You can have that.
I peak out at minus six.
So whatever the number isI'm going to add six to it. Right.
So let me let me hold you there for a setbecause I'm looking at AP
and I can see him stroking his beardwhich always tells me that he's thinking.
And I'm just wondering what questionsif he got it,
I can see it might be helpful for itfor those listening as well.
I just put a file up on Tuesdaywave of a session I did yesterday,
(16:35):
and I'm looking at the numbers
and it's got here. Peak.
Peak amplitude is -12.16 DB.
True peak amplitude is
the same -12.15
true peak. That's another.
Yeah.
It is isn't and plus is sitting at 29.7,
(16:57):
29.97
average arm is power.
We're looking at that.
No minimum monthly.
We're looking at minimum rest power.
And it says to me,
infinite, infinite or EMF dot zero DB.
Maximum minimum miss power is -23.13 DB.
(17:21):
Maximum rest is an interesting number.
I never look at that.
And I've never seen anybody call for itas a spec.
But what I do look a lotat is minimum arms.
And what you're telling me is the, theand now
this is the issuein the duration of your file.
At some point you silencedthere's enough pieces of audio.
So you have what we call digital.
(17:43):
That's why you got the minus infinity.
You have a minus infinity becauseit measures the digital black and does.
That's the quietest moment.
Well it's interestingbecause I don't use silence.
But you have a gate or something.Just knocked it.
No I've got nice I have room noise.
So I actually captured light.
Shut the door.
Open up the mind. Well,this was in your booth.
(18:04):
Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised.
Sometimes it'll be honest with you.
It's something made it like madeit think that there's zilch.
Not nothing there. Well,I got one more question.
What is the Rmsewindow number at the bottom of the box?
Our window is 200 milliseconds.
Change it to two to change it to 2000.Just.
That's the longest window
measurement against the little changesin the numbers on the screen immediately.
(18:28):
Okay, okay. Now it now it's changed.
So my may look at minimum.
Is that right.
Minimum I tell me minimum is -33.87 DB.
Now isn't that interesting. Okay.
So what that means isif the Rmse window what that means is
what's the length of timethat it's listening to.
(18:50):
Yeah. Yeah.
And then calculating offthat window of time.
Right. And in twisted ways. Average.
Yeah.
The twist the wave software
nicely gives you an optionto change that right there in that window.
Yeah. Many programs may not or don't.
So now you can this is sothis is another way to fudge the living
shit out of the number. Yeah.
If you want your your minimum Rmse numbersto be flattering, choose a short window,
(19:15):
the shortest window possible,and it will drop.
And thenand then analyze the quietest moment.
Yeah. The shorter the even more so.
But if you want to be the most honest.
Well, what is the most, well,
the most honest thingwould be to do the minimums
and tell them over x amount of time overone the most.
Honest. Yeah. Right.
And so all this numbers you guys arehearing probably menu for the first time.
(19:39):
And this is the problemwith this whole conversation of
what is the noise floor of your studiolike these.
They come up on Facebook all the time
and I just say, listen guys,and we all have to be on the same page
as to what that actually means,how it's measured.
And as we've just discussed,there's a lot of variables
and there's other stuffto think about this
(20:01):
I rather have a higher noisefloor of a nice sounding smooth
than some like lower noise of like, okay.
Yeah. Right.
It's. Yeah.
So the, the quality of the noiseand it's funny and like how
the noise you hear about peopletalking about Hi-Fi noise, right.
And whatnot.
But there's so many factorsand I think it's ridiculous for
(20:22):
honestly the some of these placesto be sweating the voice talent over
trying to give them numbers,like there's some empirical way of
determining the quality of somethingjust by by a simple minus
a negative noise, but not really possiblebecause you just got to hear it
and go, like,I can use that or I can't use that.
Yeah. And
and generally yeah, like certain thingsare going to fall in general numbers.
(20:46):
But if you like, pop your mic onand look at your meter
and you have a peak meter or whatever,and it's like it doesn't, it
just like sits down low, it like -70
minus even 60, you're probably good.
Yeah. You know, you're probably good.
And if, if at your settingyou get a reasonable level.
And then when you stop talkingand you stop breathing
(21:06):
and it drops down to -70,or a good meter doesn't
even meter so low, some of the metersonly started like -40 or so.
Right.
You shouldn't see anything.
So but you know, it's like but many,
many voice actors are on a TLM 103
or road and one or some other mightthat has no high pass,
no filter, and it measures down to ten.
(21:30):
All the noise.
Right.
So now you have this instrument of noisemeasurement that you need.
I always call the TLM 123.
The seismograph of microphones.
I was going to sayif you live in California it's even worse.
Yeah.
So so now you've got this instrumentthat's designed to measure or listen
to the entire range of sound belowthe range of human hearing
(21:52):
to above the range of human.
And now you.And that's all affecting the meter.
So I get so many people
that come to me like,oh my gosh, my, my, it's my noise floor.
Is it -30 2 a.m. I I'm screwed.
Oh my God I'm gonna needto get weatherstripping for my windows.
You know, this is, Yeah,this is a logical conclusion I get.
I get this filter.
Yes. What do you have a standing wavein your space that you don't even know
(22:14):
is there?
Because a UV,it's like nose blindness to a smell.
You stop smelling certain things,you know, and you go on vacation,
you come home and you smell your own houseor like, geez, who farted?
Yeah. That's right. Jesus, right?
It's true.
Happens all the time. We gomy apartment like,
Is that why my first choiceto leave the dog in the house?
(22:35):
Fuck it out.
Yeah, yeah.
So, like, with that rumbly sound,like you?
It's in your life.
It's in your environment.Is there all the time now?
Some people are really sensitive to itand like, some crazy.
But most people tune it out,you know, see it.
But the microphone boydoes it here at all.
And you have this crazy wavy thinggoing through your waveform.
And that is so, so easyfor any engineer to fix.
(22:58):
So is it okay for the actor to high passfilter
their file before they send in a sample
and say this is at a low low like
my, you know, -50 or 60Hz or 50.
Yeah. In thereespecially with, with a gradual slope.
And you've got no problem at all.
But no, nobody knows what you meanwhen you just said that.
What is a gradual, gradual slope mean.
(23:19):
So rather than rather than a if you'relooking at, at the, at the filter
rather than being a cliff straightup and down, you want a nice gradual.
Well, it would be
if you're looking from left to right,it would be a nice gradual rise.
I suppose if you're going forward,why do you need it to be?
You don't you don't know what it iswith certain mics. It's just a switch.
You flip.
But generally the micsare going to have less steep ones.
(23:39):
When you look at your EQ, you can see it.
You should just know thatwhen you have a very steep filter,
any filter there's there's always an equaland opposite reaction to things.
So as you have a steepercliff of the cut off,
you're going to reflectstraight back into the other side.
And so the gradual onesare more transparent.
So the FFT filter and Adobe Audition,I shouldn't
(24:02):
use it at 60Hz with an extremely,I guess, vertical line.
You might get away with it
at 60, depending on what you're doing,depending on what you're working on.
I'm talking about it'sgoing to have a it's going to have a
like like like you knowhow some filters even show you when you
when you drop the curves tight,the, the part right before it pops up.
Yeah, it's the resonance.
It literally it literally gives youa peak of energy called the.
(24:24):
Yeah.
It's like the same thinghappens with a speaker with porting.
It's it's almost the same physics.I believe.
That's what I love about the high passfilter and twist wave.
By the way, it's not actually twistedwaves high pass filter.
It's Apple's it'sthe Apple high pass filter.
Is that right.
It has a yeah it has a cutoff filterand it has a resonance setting.
So you can control both.
(24:45):
You can control how muchand what frequency.
And you can add a resonance bumpif you want or a delay
that's big for those synth guys.
I love the razor. I do don't like this.
It's also a way to artificiallygive yourself a little bit of extra,
little extra.
So it's like if you play,are you probably, you do better music.
You've played with fab Filter on waves.
(25:06):
You know that little resonancescene there?
Wow wow wow.
And you can put it in tempoand all that sort of stuff.
Those synth guys love it. Yeah,I love that.
Yeah yeah yeah.
So Andrew
yes this is my now when somebody asks youwhat's the noise floor of your studio.
What are you going to tell them. Nothing.
Yeah. Admit nothing.
Your first question is over.
(25:26):
What settings is is your question.
Yeah. Yeah. You're going to have a sir.
You're going to have a listof like six questions.
Yeah. What is the windowing. Yeah. Yeah.
What is the, are we measuringlike what are we measuring.
How we measuring it.
Yeah, we're aboutso we measure what weighting and what.
Yeah.
What scale,what weighting and what window of time.
It's interesting.
(25:46):
I must do this again though, usinga different, different setup because,
so the minimum at 33.87, -33.87.
Minimum over 248
using over over 2000 milliseconds.
Right.
That means that file, doesthis an edited file.
(26:07):
Yeah.
So over the course of that edited file,which doesn't have a bunch of room
tone, right? Yeah.
It's mostly your voice during that
segment of audio,there are very there's almost no segments.
If there's no segment in there,two full seconds long.
That is silence, right?
Okay. There's there's no drop.
(26:28):
At no point during that file
do you just literally stop talkingand have a two second gap.
Right?
So when you measure it, it's not finding
a segment of two seconds of room tonebecause there ain't there.
Right.
So you have to measure this before editingbecause you need to have some room tone
to measure.
You know you have to have that room toneto begin with.
(26:48):
So if you picked another file entrythat had some room tone on it, just,
you know, so and even more to the point,I was going to bring up like be
carefulof some other things, for example, dither.
What is dither?
Oh no, dither don't go in the waysit's noise.
So so that's you know,maybe it's a low level and below
the levels that we're talking about,they're going to affect it.
But that is adding noise to your signal.
(27:10):
And then the other one to be careful of isif you compress your voice
you are reducing the signal to noiseratio.
You are inherentlybringing up your noise floor by using a
because all the high stuff is pushing downtowards the noise anyway.
That's right, pushing that down.
Bring the whole thing uphowever you want to.
A compressor is designedto reduce dynamic range.
(27:30):
And so what is that signal to noise ratio?
You add more compression.
You're reducingthat dynamic range of signal to noise.
The noise gets louder. Right? Right.
Which is why I say please don't compressand send me your voice tracks
because it only makes itif your noise floor is,
it makes it harderfor me to get rid of it.
And then on the flip side, you can usean expander to figure lower noise more.
(27:54):
And I do that all the time.
Not only
perfectly, but I always try to get awaywith murder, an expander
and not a gate, because a gateis going to have that hard on off.
It's every engineer get in there.
Skin crawls if they detect a gate.
Oh that's.
Yeah, that's a big no no. It'sthe gate is the biggest.
(28:15):
No, no of all, you know, it'sas soon as they detect that okay.
Oh this is interesting okay.
So I've just laid another one up.
This is, roughly editedbut not dramatically
minimum of Rmse, -58.82.
And what's the window?
That's a, the window is 2000 milliseconds.
Make the window 1000.
(28:35):
I don't know what is the default.
It might be 200, but generally the shorterwindows typically.
Yeah.
What's what's the windowfor like a view meter I don't know,
but try to try 200 milliseconds Andrew,because I feel like that's more likely.
What is common.
Okay. With the 200 milliseconds?
(28:57):
This sample is 300 milliseconds,by the way.
Oh, okay.
Let's go to 3.30.
It's got A33 hundredand I got 300 milliseconds.
Okay.
So now I've got minimum Rmse of -76.43 DB.
That's very good.
Which I would sayis a really good set. Exactly.
I mean -70 I'll tell you anything.
Like tell me againwhat was what was the peak on that.
(29:18):
What was the peak and the peak.
Peak amplitude is -6.6 db okay.
So we subtract minus sixand then just go true
peak assignment peak versus peak is.
So there's so close.
And then the lux was -26.25 okay.
So that's just the average ofhow loud you are. Yeah.
(29:39):
And that's another thing.
People will sometimes be told to sendin a file with a loss of a certain value.
And that is not unless you're processingyour audio.
That's not acceptable. As of spec.
You cannot expect an actorto deliver a raw
performance at a specific average level.
Yeah, that's a ridiculous record.
I seen it come up.
(29:59):
Video game,people will say we want peaks around -18
and they and the actordoesn't know exactly what to do.
So what are they going to do,put a limiter on it I mean, right.
No, no. Right.
No thank you. Right.
No no, no.
They're expecting to have an engineersit there with their
with their knob on the,with their hand on the preamp knob.
And it's just not possiblefor an actor to do.
(30:21):
And so. But why are theywhy are they asking for these specs?
I mean, if you've got an engineerworking on it, does it matter?
I don't know, I think it's ridiculous.
I honestly think it's ridiculousthat they do this
because they're asking for somethingthat's impossible,
and they just force these actors to eitherfreak out or start over doctoring
and doing other nefarious means
(30:43):
of faking numbers that they thinkthey're trying to punch it.
Yeah, because you can't. Right?
You can't really deliver thisthis in a reasonable
asking them to do something stupid.
Yeah, absolutely.
Andrew,you said a noise were of -70, right.
But that's got to be a,that's that's an average.
So that was a that was an Rmse rule.
And then, and then if you add backif you peak normalize
(31:06):
your voice out of it, you're probablygoing to add another six decibels.
And you're probably gonna get pretty closeto that -60 range.
Yeah.
Most people in a home studio,I dare you to do better than -60,
unless you are putting $10,000into your booth.
I'll tell you what.
It's power. I'm telling you, it's power.
How clean your power is.
I think it's a lot, because I will getrecordings of a 41 six into a Scarlett,
(31:30):
and sometimes it's-75 DB all day of noise floor.
And I'm just like, damn, that's clean.
So you're saying like, are you suggesting,like a power conditioner?
Something like, I think it's just luckily
some people are luckythey live in a more rural area.
There's not a lot of dirty powerfrom neighbors.
They're not.
Have you ever noticed that if youif you have your laptop plugged
(31:50):
in, it's worsethan if you unplug your laptop?
Well, that's the absolute guarantee.
Guaranteed.
Yeah. Like you want the best noisepossible.
Clean power.
Unplugyour unplug your laptop and run on it.
And just do your session with the batteryinstead of the power.
Yeah, yeah. Here's another thing.
Just to add to this, this fileI remember I recorded, I actually
(32:14):
added gain.
I added about nine db of gain to it.
So I really recorded peak level of
minus -15 I reckon.
Oh okay. So it was actually -15.
And then I add a gain to itto bring it up to minus six.
Yeah.
(32:34):
So based on the fact it wasthat would affect the noise floor as well.
I would imagineif I was it'll bring it all up. Yeah.
I was just see a signal to noise ratio.
When you you're increases a million.
If you don't do any compressionor any expansion your ratio will stay
the same,not at least of the acoustic noise floor.
And you're just bringing it up or downrelative to
(32:54):
like,oh, here's a louder noise and louder me.
It's so interesting because like,even the microphones that have
they do have different valuesfor how quiet they are.
And some of them brag quite heavily.
Road is one of them.
They brag a lotabout how quiet the road 21 is,
like is itself noise ratingand the TLM 103 also very quiet Mike.
But in a real world scenario,you'd probably get a better average
(33:18):
noise reading from a 41 six
whose self noise is like -16.
Yeah, I'm sorry 16 DB versus the road,which is maybe four DB
because simplybecause a 441 six isn't hearing
as much informationas the Antwon is hearing.
(33:39):
I said from from the bottom of the oceanto well above,
and it's hearing everything.
The 416 and this is indicative of mostmicrophones that have smaller diaphragms.
It's much harder to get low noise out of asmall diaphragm, large diaphragm mics.
One of the big reasons for them is they'reeasier to get a better noise floor.
So those mikes are going to give youa better electronic reading.
(33:59):
But again, I think the likeyou said at the very beginning,
any of your noise is comingfrom environmental stuff
and the 416 is goingto just not hear a ton of that.
Yeah.
Not notnot just because it doesn't hear it on.
It's, it's, you know, it'scut off on the low end maybe.
Oh yeah. But also because it'sso directional, right.
Yeah. As well.
The other thing I also throw into the mix,
(34:21):
the microphone was the
818818, but I think this is thethis is the kicker.
The preamp I used was the 1073 Neve.
And that's for the Transformers.
So I'm guessingyou get quite a bit of noise.
Other noise. Yeah.
Yeah yeah.
The transformers always have noise.
Yes, yes.
So that wasn't even the cleanestsignal path you could get, your Grace or
(34:44):
something would be better.
Yeah, quite a bit.
If I use the grays, it'll be a lot cleanerthan.
Or to wrap it all up,the past for a video, which apparently,
based on some measurements, it'sit measures out very, very, very, very,
very well, pleasingly comparedto, let's just say, the Avalon.
(35:05):
That was the place where I had that gearmeasure was a place where they test
and tune and repair Avalon preamps all daylong.
Right.
So let's just say the best money can buyin terms of preamp circuits, you know,
and especially possiblybecause you can take the passport,
Vo, unplug your computer,power off the computer.
Now you're floating.And that's precisely what they were doing.
(35:25):
This in this case,they were using a laptop
to run the Power passport with no power.
It was running a battery.
So we're getting the lowestthe cleanest power.
And then we were measuring,
the tone was coming in the XLRand passing out
the one of the balanced outputsfor the monitors.
So it was running all the way through
and out the monitor outputand then into the precision.
(35:47):
So that was the whole path, the preamp.
Right, the E to D, the D to A
and the auxiliary to the, thethe the the the preamp of the yeah.
The the speaker. Yeah.
And the thing iswe don't have a way to calibrate
what the input and outputs onthe of the device should actually be.
So we had the gain at neutral 12:00.
(36:07):
You know we don't know what the gain wastruly set to.
It could have been a 40 DB of gain 38I mean we don't know 45.
So we don't know what the gain is.
And that was somebody one of our,one of our listeners, you know, wrote in.
He's like,
well, I mean, it doesn't mean much becauseI don't know what your gain setting was.
I don't know.
And I said, well, we are all comparingthis and contacts with an Avalon.
(36:29):
737 right.
Which is a very clean, very,very low distortion.
We haven't timedistortion, little distortion.
And that'll be another one.
Yeah. That's not going to start downthat road right now.
The noise,the noise reading was comparable
to the 737 and 737 is aroundminus is around -92.
Passport was in the marginof error -89 -90.
(36:53):
So it was very close.
And essentially at that low of athe price is around 1000 or 600.
Yeah. Yeah.
No no more like 1506out of the 737 is like 2500.
Yeah I say that way up. Yeah.
So so really it compares with boutique
and you know really high quality preamps.
(37:14):
And at those numbers they're,they're negligible in terms of your noise.
Like when you record something
and we're all talking aboutwhere's the noise coming from
at any of these,any of this gear we're talking about.
It's not the preamp.
It is not the preamp.
You know.
So it's it's the train that I mean when I.
Okay, that's the train Robert calling onand the foam patch, that he's
(37:36):
passing through on the way from the trainand the neighbor's internet connection.
Hey, listen, speaking of microphonesbefore we go, who's
the friend of mine in Potts Point,which is a very hoi
polloi suburb in Sydney,very wealthy part of Sydney.
Check outcan you see the number plate on this car?
Well, it's like, you know, I can't see it.I can't make it.
The number plate. He's road you.
(37:57):
No, that'll be the Freeman's.
What is it? What's the car?
Looks like a business.
I have no idea. Actually, no,it looks like a rolls.
I'm not a car fanatic.
I have no idea.I'll send you guys the photo.
You can have a look.Yeah, it's a Bentley or a rolls. Yeah.
Ask. Ask Rowan Atkinson. Healey.
And you know who that is? That.
That'd be Freeman who owns road. Right.
There you go. Yeah. Hello. Road.
(38:18):
Hello.
Model.
Well, that was fun.
Is it over the front? Audio. Sweet.
Thanks to driver
and Austrian audio recorded using SourceConnect, edited by Andrew Peters.
And make Spyrothe Got Your own audio issues.
Just ask Robbo.
Don't call him tech support for Georgethe tech William.
Don't forget to subscribe to the show
(38:39):
and join the conversationon our Facebook group to leave a comment.
Suggest a topic or just say goodbye,drop us a note at our website.
Rodeo suite.com.
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Be history. Get started.
Welcome.
Hi. Hi. Hi.
Hello, everyone, to the pro audio suite.
These guys are professional and motivated.
Please take the video.
Stars George Wisdom, founder of SourceElement Robert Marshall, international
audio engineer Darren RobinRoberts, and global voice Andrew Peters.
Thanks to tribal Austrian audio,maging passionate elements
(00:21):
George the tech wisdom and Rob and APIsinternational demos.
To find out more about us.
Check the Proteassweetcorn line up. Ready?
Here we go.
I'm here with meand welcome to another pro audio suite.
Thanks to tribus.
Don't forget the code.
Trip up to 100 to get $200
off your plosive again and Austrian audio.
(00:44):
I have to say, I just did it again.
Those plosives, the hunt,the hot property, the place of zero.
Dear, oh dear, oh, dear.
Very noisy.
And speaking of noise, that's whatwe're going to talk about today is noise.
Basically new studio.
And it's something that, I getwe talk about the stadium noise.
(01:06):
I have no noise that drives on that noise,like rotten and things, but yeah,
not random impacts or plosivesor dull noise in your system.
Noise floor noise.
Noise floors,I think is the word for this.
Yeah, indeed.
Really annoying noise. Yes.
So. So when somebody talksabout their noise floor,
they always throw a number out.
I see in every Facebook group
(01:26):
my noise, myself noiseor my my room tone or my sound.
The where I see a lot,my sound -eight inches.
So yeah, yeah, yeah.
By my sound floorI see that one all the time is -74.
Right.
And they'll just that's the number period.
Right.
First of all,
what does it mean when so many mentionedthe sound floor or noise floor
(01:48):
or whatever terminology they mean.
What does it mean.
Well I don't know.
See this is the thingbecause if you're talking about noise off
your microphone, isn't it going to dependon how much gain you've got on the mic
and all that sort of stuff?
I mean, how what a noise floor of minuswhatever means jack sheet,
depending on how much it's all relative,it's all relative
to the performance volumethat you're putting into it.
(02:11):
So the signal or yeah, the signal to noiseratio is the thing.
Right.
So if you're recording a whisperand you're always recording stuff
that's whispering your noise, flooris way more critical than if you are doing
video games and always yelling, yeah,because your preamp can be turned down.
And now the ratio betweenwhat you are interested
in, the yelling, the whispering,or in the case
(02:32):
yelling is a lot louder than the noisethat's inherent in your booth.
And so now you want the biggest difference
between the signal you wantand the signal you don't want.
And so it's so it's it is a ratio really.
But it's not expressed as a ratiois it George.
It is expressed in decibelsor a negative number.
And and is it Rmse.
(02:52):
Is it a lot smaller.
Is it a peak. It what is the numberand what is its weighting.
And there's so many other ways to dowe measure that.
And doesyour software know the difference.
And does the person that's asking youthe number know what any of this stuff
means. Exactly.
And this is a way
that microphone companies use to hidethe weenie can confuse people.
Microphone work a lot
(03:14):
higher spec than it might be,especially when it comes to the weighting.
The weightings are can be very confusing.
Yeah, you might see a weighting or seeweighting.
Those are the two.
Most common is that there is no Bweighting.
It's always A and C whatever.
Is itC that emulates the human hearing curve.
Like the sensitivityto low versus AI frequencies.
(03:36):
So it's C weighting is I always get thisI think
I think they're both based on the FletcherMunson curve with Fletcher Munson.
Yeah.
But Fletcher,neither of us are saying that correctly.
Is that what you getwhen you've had a couple accounts?
The Fletcher Munchen aa weighting mimics the human hearing
and C weighting is less selective.
C is more is more,let's just say more broad
(03:57):
and probably more sensitiveto low frequency.
Right.
So that's the less forgivingand and high frequency too,
because the Fletcher Munson curveis it's your smiley face.
Right.
So it's your sad face, right.
That you see weighting is less forgiving.
It's it.
So what happens isit's in everybody's software.
They they hit record.
They get the room tone right.And they hit stop.
(04:20):
And then they analyze itsomehow, like because somebody asked them,
what's the self?
What is the noise floor of your studio?
That's that's what everybody is askedyou know, as an actor and voice actor,
what is the noise for pure studio noisefor my studio when my preamp turned off
is, you know, exactly what does it mean,where what noise are we measuring?
(04:41):
We've got so many sources of noise.
We have this the noise that emanatesfrom the microphone, from the preamp,
maybe somewhere else down the signalchain, some plug in.
You have some plugins createa plug in that you might have for waves.
Waves.You got to turn it off. That's right.
Literally be careful.
Everyone out there waves
literally has like 60 cycle noisebecause somehow that's vintage compressor.
(05:01):
You can dial in noise if you want to.
Yeah, absolutely. An agedelay. Same thing.
Yeah okay.
Here's a question there.
So if I'm if I'm recordingor AP by the way and and I can
I mean I know exactly and I come inI've actually captured 4824
and I'm peaking at around about -18.
(05:23):
Okay.
Which is that's pretty low. Pretty low.
So pretty low.
If I capture that leveland I send that off,
what is going to happenwhen they start compressing.
They're going to turn it up.
So so you by peaking at -18 you have nothelped your signal to noise ratio
because you have 18dB
(05:43):
of space between those two that you've notused. Yep.
Okay. Right.
But does you need to use all 18. No.
Because then you risk hitting the wall.
So but you want to be more at like minussix maybe at least minus ten minus three.
You start to sweat, you know,
where's the sweet spot?
I always try to get people to come insomewhere between -12 and -6.
(06:06):
I think that's the yellow rangeon most matters.
And I always say, if you're in the yellow,let it mellow.
All right. That's right. Yeah. I
if you're
always in the green, it's a little lean.
Because again, that's, that's my,that's my little monitor.
So, so yeah.
You can turn your preamp upand assuming that, you know, like that's
(06:26):
going to pull the noise fromthe preamp will be less of an issue then,
but then that will pull upall the background noise with it.
Because if you think about it, the noise,the volume
of your voice relative tothe noise of the room is a constant.
Yeah, you're never going to change that.
And if your preamp was perfect,then recording at -18
(06:48):
wouldn't make a differencebecause it would all raise up in ratio.
But by having your preampat the right level,
you're at least getting the most outof your signal to noise
ratio of the preamp and the microphoneitself.
You're optimizingyour signal path or signal chain.
You're getting the best resolutionthat your preamp can provide.
You're getting the best sensitivityyour microphone can provide.
(07:10):
So those things are the D converter.
Yeah.
So those are all essentially takenout of the equation.
If you're if your gearis of decent quality,
the sound you hear in that room tonewhen you hit play and you listen
99% of the time, probably not the mic
probably not the preamp, it'sprobably the environment, right?
(07:30):
Yeah. But what sort of mikesare we talking about that make noise?
I mean, tubemics obviously will create noise.
Yeah. Dynamic mics. Here.
Let me, let me give you guysa really good example.
Wait a minute.
Dynamic Mike does a dynamicMike make noise?
I don't know that it makes noise.
It just makes it makes the preamp workharder. Yes.
Yeah, but I think I havea good mic example here. And
sorry Austrian audio.
(07:52):
We're going to, we're going to I'mnot on an Austrian audio mic right now.
So what's it doing here if we're trying todemonstrate bad, bad stuff.
Not good.
I was working quick and I didn'tI didn't, like, give it up.
So basically, here's a kind of a batterypowered condenser mic.
So this is now the boom on my headset.
(08:12):
Too much gain, by the way.
21 seconds. Awesome. Forever.
Yeah, yeah. That's right. Exactly.
But when I, when I come back on this,you're going to hear the,
the noise floor of just, All right, now,do you hear the difference in this one
at all? Yeah, a whole lot less level.
Level? Yeah, a lot less level. Right.
Let's say in theory we do because we'regoing to hear the raw audio in the post.
(08:34):
But right now we're hearing the,the you're hearing, which is like noise.
Right.
And so because the levels less in orderto bring it up than I have to hit,
you know, bring my preamp upand then up goes all that noise.
Yeah. Right.
Right.
And, and even the electronic noisein this case.
So for a voice over a microphone of,of, of a higher sensitivity
(08:56):
or maybe the highest possible sensitivitytheoretically
is the best microphonefor a voice over the road.
Ntg five.
This is a very modern, very new mic.
It's only been around for a few years.
First thing I noticed with thatMike is it's high.
The highest output Mike had ever used.
It was like shockingly hot.
That would be good.
That means that you could plug thatinto any old cheap audio interface
(09:20):
which only has like a Scarletttwo i2 Gen two that has 48 DB of gain.
I still think you're rightand wrong, right?
I think you're right and wrongbecause there's still the concept of self
noise on the microphone.
So the microphone could have a lotof output, but still a lot of self noise.
There's one minus.
If you had a low output micwith a really clean preamp,
(09:42):
the Ntg five is pretty quietthough I was using it last week.
I had to work up at my parents placeand I took it with me.
Yeah, it's pretty quiet.
Yeah. So low self noise, high output.
You got a really great Mike.
There's one microphonethat a lot of people use and I like it too
that it stands in for 416 all the time.
The 41 six.
And this is the 87 five. Yeah.
(10:04):
The AudioTechnica 875 are it's a really bargain mic
and it sounds really nice,but that is its biggest Achilles heel.
It is.
It is a noisy.
Yeah.We tested it a couple of weeks ago. Right.
Yeah. Yeah.
Is that the one we used?
Yeah. Noise is noticeable. Yeah.
And and even switchingbetween this Audio-Technica
and this boom mic I can hear the noisedifference is switching between these two.
(10:25):
Because even though this boom micsounds like calling all cars,
I can hear the hiss difference.
It's clean. It's.
Yeah.
The mic you're wearing on your headsetlooks like just a standard headset.
Nobody knows thatthat's actually a $1,500 microphone.
Yeah. Underneath that foam ball.
That's it's
just that this thing is a $1,500 micand it it is definitely very clean.
It just has a horrible EQ curve meantto make it over the top of a race car.
(10:49):
Right.
It's for, you know, reporters on the trackreporting.
Yeah. Covering. Exactly.
So what can we recommendas best practice, then, for that voice
actorwho's being asked to tell the report back
what my studio's actual noisesor the noise level of my studio?
I mean, I said,you answer a question with a question.
(11:11):
I would say that to just be like,what rating would you like?
Would you like the noisefor, expressed in peak or Rmse,
which is somethingthat we should just talk about right away?
Okay. Let's talk about the differencebetween those two.
And they're quite can be quite diff.
So basically it's the difference betweenthe instant level and the loudest content.
Yeah that's right. Yeah.
Or the average level Rmse is average.
(11:32):
And peak is instantlywhat's happening right now.
So you could have a right.
So you could have a high noiseor your noise floor expressed in the peak
level would theoretically be higheror worse,
a worse set, a worse number
then the Rmse or the average,because you're going to have an average.
Okay.
Here's another questionthen based on Twisted Wave,
(11:55):
I'm looking at twisted wave on my screenas we speak.
And on the right hand side there is itsays the level meter
and it says Rmse at the bottom.
So is that meter on twistedwave an Rmse or a peak?
Make sure the Rmse, it's an arm's meter.
Well it's right.
So in Rmsemeter is more like a view meter.
(12:16):
It's an averaging meter. Yeah. It's both.
So the number at the top of that viewmeter
is a peak momentary number.
And the bottom number at the bottom ofthe twist wave meter is the Rmse reading.
Okay. So it shows you both at allthe time. Right. Okay.
Which is kind of him I wish I wish AdobeAudition would do that.
(12:36):
It's really frustratingthat audition does not show you,
Rmse or loss metering.
Now you can get plug ins.
And what's a good free one?
You mean,is that the free? Yeah, that's the one.
Everything is a free one.
That's I yeah, it's perfectly good enough.
And easy to licenseand tells you what you need to do.
Yeah. Right.
And one thing, one thing to be clearis that like loves and
(12:59):
okay, FS are a version of averaging,but they are over time.
Well and also they're,
they're frequency dependentbecause they're very much voice oriented
because they're directedat dialog normalization for program
for TV and whatnot.
So they are an averagebut they also weight it.
And we talked about that earlier.
The weighting is like applyingan EQ curve to the measurement
(13:21):
so that you're focusing on a certainfrequency range so to speak.
So lots and also they have a timing to it.
The timing of the averageis a little bit different.
Well that's the thing. So this isI wanted to get into that too.
There's so many different aspectsabout measuring noise.
So you're in twist a wave at AP.
You hit you hit your file menu
and drop downand you'll find something called analyze.
(13:43):
This is going to give youmuch more useful information because it's
going to give you first of all, it'sgoing to analyze the entire file,
whatever it is.
If it's an hour long it'sgoing to look at the whole file.
Now you can select a tiny bit of itand analyze it.
But generally we analyze the whole thing.
And now you're goingto get all this information.
And you may see a peak amplitude of -17.
(14:05):
In my case based on the last fileI just recorded and edited,
it has a peak of zero DB,because at some point it was a transient
loud noise by melaughing or snapping into and it hit zero.
And then I see, I see laughs,which is what Robert was talking about.
That's that average level calculationthat's weighted based on hearing.
(14:25):
And it's you said it's more voicecentric, right, Robert.
Yeah, yeah.
Because it's for TV programing.
And then below that I see average Rmse.
So now I see two numbers, both of themmeasuring essentially an average level.
But in this case very different readings.
The love's is at -20 almost -27
(14:47):
and the Rmse is -35.
So now what numbersare we looking at here?
I mean we're measuring noise, right?
So if someone asks youwhat your noise floor is
you got to ask them,how do you want me to report this to you?
Because if not, almost less is more.
And, you know,if you had to report back to them,
(15:07):
then you give them an average number.
That's always going to look, look better.
And probably the, the,
the one based on lovesis probably the one that looks the best.
And I guess maybe. Yeah.
I mean, in this case, so,so then you also have minimum arms.
So in twist Away there's essentially whatis the sustained minimum average level.
(15:30):
And that essentially gives youyour noise floor
essentially againassuming your peak is at zero right.
So my opinion is is take that file.
Bring it.
So the peaks are at zeronormalized to zero.
Then do this measurement.
And when you look at that minimum RMS,which is how loud the noise is
(15:51):
at a sustained period of time,that to me is the most honest
possible measurement of what ain a pure in a pure recording.
Once you once you figure out
the mic preamp setting for yourpeaked or normalized setting,
and you
say, okay, so normalizing it,I have to bring it up by
six DB or whatever, you can almostjust do the calculation in your head.
(16:13):
You can have that.
I peak out at minus six.
So whatever the number isI'm going to add six to it. Right.
So let me let me hold you there for a setbecause I'm looking at AP
and I can see him stroking his beardwhich always tells me that he's thinking.
And I'm just wondering what questionsif he got it,
I can see it might be helpful for itfor those listening as well.
I just put a file up on Tuesdaywave of a session I did yesterday,
(16:35):
and I'm looking at the numbers
and it's got here. Peak.
Peak amplitude is -12.16 DB.
True peak amplitude is
the same -12.15
true peak. That's another.
Yeah.
It is isn't and plus is sitting at 29.7,
(16:57):
29.97
average arm is power.
We're looking at that.
No minimum monthly.
We're looking at minimum rest power.
And it says to me,
infinite, infinite or EMF dot zero DB.
Maximum minimum miss power is -23.13 DB.
(17:21):
Maximum rest is an interesting number.
I never look at that.
And I've never seen anybody call for itas a spec.
But what I do look a lotat is minimum arms.
And what you're telling me is the, theand now
this is the issuein the duration of your file.
At some point you silencedthere's enough pieces of audio.
So you have what we call digital.
(17:43):
That's why you got the minus infinity.
You have a minus infinity becauseit measures the digital black and does.
That's the quietest moment.
Well it's interestingbecause I don't use silence.
But you have a gate or something.Just knocked it.
No I've got nice I have room noise.
So I actually captured light.
Shut the door.
Open up the mind. Well,this was in your booth.
(18:04):
Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised.
Sometimes it'll be honest with you.
It's something made it like madeit think that there's zilch.
Not nothing there. Well,I got one more question.
What is the Rmsewindow number at the bottom of the box?
Our window is 200 milliseconds.
Change it to two to change it to 2000.Just.
That's the longest window
measurement against the little changesin the numbers on the screen immediately.
(18:28):
Okay, okay. Now it now it's changed.
So my may look at minimum.
Is that right.
Minimum I tell me minimum is -33.87 DB.
Now isn't that interesting. Okay.
So what that means isif the Rmse window what that means is
what's the length of timethat it's listening to.
(18:50):
Yeah. Yeah.
And then calculating offthat window of time.
Right. And in twisted ways. Average.
Yeah.
The twist the wave software
nicely gives you an optionto change that right there in that window.
Yeah. Many programs may not or don't.
So now you can this is sothis is another way to fudge the living
shit out of the number. Yeah.
If you want your your minimum Rmse numbersto be flattering, choose a short window,
(19:15):
the shortest window possible,and it will drop.
And thenand then analyze the quietest moment.
Yeah. The shorter the even more so.
But if you want to be the most honest.
Well, what is the most, well,
the most honest thingwould be to do the minimums
and tell them over x amount of time overone the most.
Honest. Yeah. Right.
And so all this numbers you guys arehearing probably menu for the first time.
(19:39):
And this is the problemwith this whole conversation of
what is the noise floor of your studiolike these.
They come up on Facebook all the time
and I just say, listen guys,and we all have to be on the same page
as to what that actually means,how it's measured.
And as we've just discussed,there's a lot of variables
and there's other stuffto think about this
(20:01):
I rather have a higher noisefloor of a nice sounding smooth
than some like lower noise of like, okay.
Yeah. Right.
It's. Yeah.
So the, the quality of the noiseand it's funny and like how
the noise you hear about peopletalking about Hi-Fi noise, right.
And whatnot.
But there's so many factorsand I think it's ridiculous for
(20:22):
honestly the some of these placesto be sweating the voice talent over
trying to give them numbers,like there's some empirical way of
determining the quality of somethingjust by by a simple minus
a negative noise, but not really possiblebecause you just got to hear it
and go, like,I can use that or I can't use that.
Yeah. And
and generally yeah, like certain thingsare going to fall in general numbers.
(20:46):
But if you like, pop your mic onand look at your meter
and you have a peak meter or whatever,and it's like it doesn't, it
just like sits down low, it like -70
minus even 60, you're probably good.
Yeah. You know, you're probably good.
And if, if at your settingyou get a reasonable level.
And then when you stop talkingand you stop breathing
(21:06):
and it drops down to -70,or a good meter doesn't
even meter so low, some of the metersonly started like -40 or so.
Right.
You shouldn't see anything.
So but you know, it's like but many,
many voice actors are on a TLM 103
or road and one or some other mightthat has no high pass,
no filter, and it measures down to ten.
(21:30):
All the noise.
Right.
So now you have this instrument of noisemeasurement that you need.
I always call the TLM 123.
The seismograph of microphones.
I was going to sayif you live in California it's even worse.
Yeah.
So so now you've got this instrumentthat's designed to measure or listen
to the entire range of sound belowthe range of human hearing
(21:52):
to above the range of human.
And now you.And that's all affecting the meter.
So I get so many people
that come to me like,oh my gosh, my, my, it's my noise floor.
Is it -30 2 a.m. I I'm screwed.
Oh my God I'm gonna needto get weatherstripping for my windows.
You know, this is, Yeah,this is a logical conclusion I get.
I get this filter.
Yes. What do you have a standing wavein your space that you don't even know
(22:14):
is there?
Because a UV,it's like nose blindness to a smell.
You stop smelling certain things,you know, and you go on vacation,
you come home and you smell your own houseor like, geez, who farted?
Yeah. That's right. Jesus, right?
It's true.
Happens all the time. We gomy apartment like,
Is that why my first choiceto leave the dog in the house?
(22:35):
Fuck it out.
Yeah, yeah.
So, like, with that rumbly sound,like you?
It's in your life.
It's in your environment.Is there all the time now?
Some people are really sensitive to itand like, some crazy.
But most people tune it out,you know, see it.
But the microphone boydoes it here at all.
And you have this crazy wavy thinggoing through your waveform.
And that is so, so easyfor any engineer to fix.
(22:58):
So is it okay for the actor to high passfilter
their file before they send in a sample
and say this is at a low low like
my, you know, -50 or 60Hz or 50.
Yeah. In thereespecially with, with a gradual slope.
And you've got no problem at all.
But no, nobody knows what you meanwhen you just said that.
What is a gradual, gradual slope mean.
(23:19):
So rather than rather than a if you'relooking at, at the, at the filter
rather than being a cliff straightup and down, you want a nice gradual.
Well, it would be
if you're looking from left to right,it would be a nice gradual rise.
I suppose if you're going forward,why do you need it to be?
You don't you don't know what it iswith certain mics. It's just a switch.
You flip.
But generally the micsare going to have less steep ones.
(23:39):
When you look at your EQ, you can see it.
You should just know thatwhen you have a very steep filter,
any filter there's there's always an equaland opposite reaction to things.
So as you have a steepercliff of the cut off,
you're going to reflectstraight back into the other side.
And so the gradual onesare more transparent.
So the FFT filter and Adobe Audition,I shouldn't
(24:02):
use it at 60Hz with an extremely,I guess, vertical line.
You might get away with it
at 60, depending on what you're doing,depending on what you're working on.
I'm talking about it'sgoing to have a it's going to have a
like like like you knowhow some filters even show you when you
when you drop the curves tight,the, the part right before it pops up.
Yeah, it's the resonance.
It literally it literally gives youa peak of energy called the.
(24:24):
Yeah.
It's like the same thinghappens with a speaker with porting.
It's it's almost the same physics.I believe.
That's what I love about the high passfilter and twist wave.
By the way, it's not actually twistedwaves high pass filter.
It's Apple's it'sthe Apple high pass filter.
Is that right.
It has a yeah it has a cutoff filterand it has a resonance setting.
So you can control both.
(24:45):
You can control how muchand what frequency.
And you can add a resonance bumpif you want or a delay
that's big for those synth guys.
I love the razor. I do don't like this.
It's also a way to artificiallygive yourself a little bit of extra,
little extra.
So it's like if you play,are you probably, you do better music.
You've played with fab Filter on waves.
(25:06):
You know that little resonancescene there?
Wow wow wow.
And you can put it in tempoand all that sort of stuff.
Those synth guys love it. Yeah,I love that.
Yeah yeah yeah.
So Andrew
yes this is my now when somebody asks youwhat's the noise floor of your studio.
What are you going to tell them. Nothing.
Yeah. Admit nothing.
Your first question is over.
(25:26):
What settings is is your question.
Yeah. Yeah. You're going to have a sir.
You're going to have a listof like six questions.
Yeah. What is the windowing. Yeah. Yeah.
What is the, are we measuringlike what are we measuring.
How we measuring it.
Yeah, we're aboutso we measure what weighting and what.
Yeah.
What scale,what weighting and what window of time.
It's interesting.
(25:46):
I must do this again though, usinga different, different setup because,
so the minimum at 33.87, -33.87.
Minimum over 248
using over over 2000 milliseconds.
Right.
That means that file, doesthis an edited file.
(26:07):
Yeah.
So over the course of that edited file,which doesn't have a bunch of room
tone, right? Yeah.
It's mostly your voice during that
segment of audio,there are very there's almost no segments.
If there's no segment in there,two full seconds long.
That is silence, right?
Okay. There's there's no drop.
(26:28):
At no point during that file
do you just literally stop talkingand have a two second gap.
Right?
So when you measure it, it's not finding
a segment of two seconds of room tonebecause there ain't there.
Right.
So you have to measure this before editingbecause you need to have some room tone
to measure.
You know you have to have that room toneto begin with.
(26:48):
So if you picked another file entrythat had some room tone on it, just,
you know, so and even more to the point,I was going to bring up like be
carefulof some other things, for example, dither.
What is dither?
Oh no, dither don't go in the waysit's noise.
So so that's you know,maybe it's a low level and below
the levels that we're talking about,they're going to affect it.
But that is adding noise to your signal.
(27:10):
And then the other one to be careful of isif you compress your voice
you are reducing the signal to noiseratio.
You are inherentlybringing up your noise floor by using a
because all the high stuff is pushing downtowards the noise anyway.
That's right, pushing that down.
Bring the whole thing uphowever you want to.
A compressor is designedto reduce dynamic range.
(27:30):
And so what is that signal to noise ratio?
You add more compression.
You're reducingthat dynamic range of signal to noise.
The noise gets louder. Right? Right.
Which is why I say please don't compressand send me your voice tracks
because it only makes itif your noise floor is,
it makes it harderfor me to get rid of it.
And then on the flip side, you can usean expander to figure lower noise more.
(27:54):
And I do that all the time.
Not only
perfectly, but I always try to get awaywith murder, an expander
and not a gate, because a gateis going to have that hard on off.
It's every engineer get in there.
Skin crawls if they detect a gate.
Oh that's.
Yeah, that's a big no no. It'sthe gate is the biggest.
(28:15):
No, no of all, you know, it'sas soon as they detect that okay.
Oh this is interesting okay.
So I've just laid another one up.
This is, roughly editedbut not dramatically
minimum of Rmse, -58.82.
And what's the window?
That's a, the window is 2000 milliseconds.
Make the window 1000.
(28:35):
I don't know what is the default.
It might be 200, but generally the shorterwindows typically.
Yeah.
What's what's the windowfor like a view meter I don't know,
but try to try 200 milliseconds Andrew,because I feel like that's more likely.
What is common.
Okay. With the 200 milliseconds?
(28:57):
This sample is 300 milliseconds,by the way.
Oh, okay.
Let's go to 3.30.
It's got A33 hundredand I got 300 milliseconds.
Okay.
So now I've got minimum Rmse of -76.43 DB.
That's very good.
Which I would sayis a really good set. Exactly.
I mean -70 I'll tell you anything.
Like tell me againwhat was what was the peak on that.
(29:18):
What was the peak and the peak.
Peak amplitude is -6.6 db okay.
So we subtract minus sixand then just go true
peak assignment peak versus peak is.
So there's so close.
And then the lux was -26.25 okay.
So that's just the average ofhow loud you are. Yeah.
(29:39):
And that's another thing.
People will sometimes be told to sendin a file with a loss of a certain value.
And that is not unless you're processingyour audio.
That's not acceptable. As of spec.
You cannot expect an actorto deliver a raw
performance at a specific average level.
Yeah, that's a ridiculous record.
I seen it come up.
(29:59):
Video game,people will say we want peaks around -18
and they and the actordoesn't know exactly what to do.
So what are they going to do,put a limiter on it I mean, right.
No, no. Right.
No thank you. Right.
No no, no.
They're expecting to have an engineersit there with their
with their knob on the,with their hand on the preamp knob.
And it's just not possiblefor an actor to do.
(30:21):
And so. But why are theywhy are they asking for these specs?
I mean, if you've got an engineerworking on it, does it matter?
I don't know, I think it's ridiculous.
I honestly think it's ridiculousthat they do this
because they're asking for somethingthat's impossible,
and they just force these actors to eitherfreak out or start over doctoring
and doing other nefarious means
(30:43):
of faking numbers that they thinkthey're trying to punch it.
Yeah, because you can't. Right?
You can't really deliver thisthis in a reasonable
asking them to do something stupid.
Yeah, absolutely.
Andrew,you said a noise were of -70, right.
But that's got to be a,that's that's an average.
So that was a that was an Rmse rule.
And then, and then if you add backif you peak normalize
(31:06):
your voice out of it, you're probablygoing to add another six decibels.
And you're probably gonna get pretty closeto that -60 range.
Yeah.
Most people in a home studio,I dare you to do better than -60,
unless you are putting $10,000into your booth.
I'll tell you what.
It's power. I'm telling you, it's power.
How clean your power is.
I think it's a lot, because I will getrecordings of a 41 six into a Scarlett,
(31:30):
and sometimes it's-75 DB all day of noise floor.
And I'm just like, damn, that's clean.
So you're saying like, are you suggesting,like a power conditioner?
Something like, I think it's just luckily
some people are luckythey live in a more rural area.
There's not a lot of dirty powerfrom neighbors.
They're not.
Have you ever noticed that if youif you have your laptop plugged
(31:50):
in, it's worsethan if you unplug your laptop?
Well, that's the absolute guarantee.
Guaranteed.
Yeah. Like you want the best noisepossible.
Clean power.
Unplugyour unplug your laptop and run on it.
And just do your session with the batteryinstead of the power.
Yeah, yeah. Here's another thing.
Just to add to this, this fileI remember I recorded, I actually
(32:14):
added gain.
I added about nine db of gain to it.
So I really recorded peak level of
minus -15 I reckon.
Oh okay. So it was actually -15.
And then I add a gain to itto bring it up to minus six.
Yeah.
(32:34):
So based on the fact it wasthat would affect the noise floor as well.
I would imagineif I was it'll bring it all up. Yeah.
I was just see a signal to noise ratio.
When you you're increases a million.
If you don't do any compressionor any expansion your ratio will stay
the same,not at least of the acoustic noise floor.
And you're just bringing it up or downrelative to
(32:54):
like,oh, here's a louder noise and louder me.
It's so interesting because like,even the microphones that have
they do have different valuesfor how quiet they are.
And some of them brag quite heavily.
Road is one of them.
They brag a lotabout how quiet the road 21 is,
like is itself noise ratingand the TLM 103 also very quiet Mike.
But in a real world scenario,you'd probably get a better average
(33:18):
noise reading from a 41 six
whose self noise is like -16.
Yeah, I'm sorry 16 DB versus the road,which is maybe four DB
because simplybecause a 441 six isn't hearing
as much informationas the Antwon is hearing.
(33:39):
I said from from the bottom of the oceanto well above,
and it's hearing everything.
The 416 and this is indicative of mostmicrophones that have smaller diaphragms.
It's much harder to get low noise out of asmall diaphragm, large diaphragm mics.
One of the big reasons for them is they'reeasier to get a better noise floor.
So those mikes are going to give youa better electronic reading.
(33:59):
But again, I think the likeyou said at the very beginning,
any of your noise is comingfrom environmental stuff
and the 416 is goingto just not hear a ton of that.
Yeah.
Not notnot just because it doesn't hear it on.
It's, it's, you know, it'scut off on the low end maybe.
Oh yeah. But also because it'sso directional, right.
Yeah. As well.
The other thing I also throw into the mix,
(34:21):
the microphone was the
818818, but I think this is thethis is the kicker.
The preamp I used was the 1073 Neve.
And that's for the Transformers.
So I'm guessingyou get quite a bit of noise.
Other noise. Yeah.
Yeah yeah.
The transformers always have noise.
Yes, yes.
So that wasn't even the cleanestsignal path you could get, your Grace or
(34:44):
something would be better.
Yeah, quite a bit.
If I use the grays, it'll be a lot cleanerthan.
Or to wrap it all up,the past for a video, which apparently,
based on some measurements, it'sit measures out very, very, very, very,
very well, pleasingly comparedto, let's just say, the Avalon.
(35:05):
That was the place where I had that gearmeasure was a place where they test
and tune and repair Avalon preamps all daylong.
Right.
So let's just say the best money can buyin terms of preamp circuits, you know,
and especially possiblybecause you can take the passport,
Vo, unplug your computer,power off the computer.
Now you're floating.And that's precisely what they were doing.
(35:25):
This in this case,they were using a laptop
to run the Power passport with no power.
It was running a battery.
So we're getting the lowestthe cleanest power.
And then we were measuring,
the tone was coming in the XLRand passing out
the one of the balanced outputsfor the monitors.
So it was running all the way through
and out the monitor outputand then into the precision.
(35:47):
So that was the whole path, the preamp.
Right, the E to D, the D to A
and the auxiliary to the, thethe the the the preamp of the yeah.
The the speaker. Yeah.
And the thing iswe don't have a way to calibrate
what the input and outputs onthe of the device should actually be.
So we had the gain at neutral 12:00.
(36:07):
You know we don't know what the gain wastruly set to.
It could have been a 40 DB of gain 38I mean we don't know 45.
So we don't know what the gain is.
And that was somebody one of our,one of our listeners, you know, wrote in.
He's like,
well, I mean, it doesn't mean much becauseI don't know what your gain setting was.
I don't know.
And I said, well, we are all comparingthis and contacts with an Avalon.
(36:29):
737 right.
Which is a very clean, very,very low distortion.
We haven't timedistortion, little distortion.
And that'll be another one.
Yeah. That's not going to start downthat road right now.
The noise,the noise reading was comparable
to the 737 and 737 is aroundminus is around -92.
Passport was in the marginof error -89 -90.
(36:53):
So it was very close.
And essentially at that low of athe price is around 1000 or 600.
Yeah. Yeah.
No no more like 1506out of the 737 is like 2500.
Yeah I say that way up. Yeah.
So so really it compares with boutique
and you know really high quality preamps.
(37:14):
And at those numbers they're,they're negligible in terms of your noise.
Like when you record something
and we're all talking aboutwhere's the noise coming from
at any of these,any of this gear we're talking about.
It's not the preamp.
It is not the preamp.
You know.
So it's it's the train that I mean when I.
Okay, that's the train Robert calling onand the foam patch, that he's
(37:36):
passing through on the way from the trainand the neighbor's internet connection.
Hey, listen, speaking of microphonesbefore we go, who's
the friend of mine in Potts Point,which is a very hoi
polloi suburb in Sydney,very wealthy part of Sydney.
Check outcan you see the number plate on this car?
Well, it's like, you know, I can't see it.I can't make it.
The number plate. He's road you.
(37:57):
No, that'll be the Freeman's.
What is it? What's the car?
Looks like a business.
I have no idea. Actually, no,it looks like a rolls.
I'm not a car fanatic.
I have no idea.I'll send you guys the photo.
You can have a look.Yeah, it's a Bentley or a rolls. Yeah.
Ask. Ask Rowan Atkinson. Healey.
And you know who that is? That.
That'd be Freeman who owns road. Right.
There you go. Yeah. Hello. Road.
(38:18):
Hello.
Model.
Well, that was fun.
Is it over the front? Audio. Sweet.
Thanks to driver
and Austrian audio recorded using SourceConnect, edited by Andrew Peters.
And make Spyrothe Got Your own audio issues.
Just ask Robbo.
Don't call him tech support for Georgethe tech William.
Don't forget to subscribe to the show
(38:39):
and join the conversationon our Facebook group to leave a comment.
Suggest a topic or just say goodbye,drop us a note at our website.
Rodeo suite.com.
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