The Beginning
When we started recording through about show #16, we both hunched over a single usb flex mic plugged into our iBook. This worked okay, but it quickly became frustrating as our shows got longer and our audience grew.
Current Setup
Thanks to our generous subscribers, we were able to lay in some pro-quality equipment that helps with the production of the show. Post-production now takes about an hour, when in the past it used to take about 10-12 hours. Having pro-level equipment also makes a huge difference in sound quality, as well as making it much more pleasurable to record and produce the show.
Here's what we use now:
- Two Shure SM7B mics with OC White Proboom arms
- MOTU 896HD "...everything you need to turn your computer into a powerful 24-bit, 192kHz digital audio workstation."
- Mackie 1402-VLZ3 Mixer Very clean mic preamps and nice volume sliders (not pictured)
- dbx 1066 compressor/limiter/gate
- aphex 204 aural exciter with big bottom (hehe)
- Telos One digital telephone hybrid (for recording telephone interviews, not pictured below)
- mackie HM-54 headphone mixer/amplifier
- AKG K-240 headphones x2 for live monitoring
- Fuhrman M-8 power conditioner
Here's our basic workflow:
- effects and music are queued with a macbook plugged into the Mackie.
- we process our vocals through the compressor/limiter/gate then through the aural exciter.
- the Telos One goes into the 896HD, and the other sounds are routed to the Telos through the 896HD.
- all tracks (3 mono, 1 stereo) are recorded in a single shot with the 896HD firewire into another Macbook. We use MOTU AudioDesk to record and create the mixdown, and Bias Peak Pro for final editing, mastering, and RMS volume normalization.
- we export an AIFF from Peak, and then use LAME on the command line to produce the final MP3. LAME provides the best quality out of any encoder we've used, hands down.
- we then upload this to our server where it is automatically tagged and fed to the RSS feed for the show.
The software that runs our podcast site is loudblog.
Here's a shot of our current setup (well, the rack at least, minus the mixer and a few other things):
Thanks
- Our subscribers and donors are generous enough to help fund these equipment purchases. Thanks! When we didn't have this equipment, we went insane each week doing post-production editing. It took literally TEN TIMES as long as it does now that we have a quality setup. Our subscribers and donators rock and we love you.
