Firstly, for a mic I am currently using a Marshall mxl v63 (large capsule condenser, cardioid pattern). The main reason for this is... I already had it. I performed basket removal surgery on it and put a double pop filter in front and I'm fairly pleased with the sound. Occasionally I do wish it was a little warmer in the upper part of mid range. I'm wondering what people who have upgraded from the 25$ usb mics but can't afford the 2,000$ studio mics are using. I see a lot of people switching to shotgun mics in the booths, are they worth an upgrade? I know a mic wont make my voice sound better, but I'd like to have a good setup so there's nothing to blame for the sound besides me.
Second, for another place I record we have to provide working files sampled at 48 kHz and 24bit. Here it looks like 41 khz /16bit is the requirement. If I accidentally leave librivox settings on there is no way to get that "resolution" back, but it seems like I should be able to record at the higher rate and then down-sample to the librivox rate. Besides needing to double check the volume levels, does anyone know a reason this wouldn't work/ ruin audio quality? I was thinking of switching to recording at 192 kHz and 24 bit as that is the max my setup goes to and then just converting everything to "lower quality" afterwards. Is there a reason not to do that?
"mid range" mic advice and sample rate question
Quality of the sound is not really of a huge concern for LV, methinks. If one can make the sound better by a couple manipulations in post-processing, we recommend it (noise reduction, compression, notch filtering and the like), but it's really all up to you.
As far as sampling, we have the requirement of 44100 samples per second. Isn't that the audio CD standard? I believe it was first introduced because the users of Archive might want to cut a CD of the book without additional reduction in quality. BTW, that's why we recommend sections to run no longer than 74 minutes.
Resampling does reduce the quality somewhat, I recon, but not enough that our listeners would mind. Ruin? Nah...
I record in 24 bits if I can, just so noise cleaning and amplification work more precisely. I am not convinced that 16 or 24 bits make any difference to the MP3.
As far as sampling, we have the requirement of 44100 samples per second. Isn't that the audio CD standard? I believe it was first introduced because the users of Archive might want to cut a CD of the book without additional reduction in quality. BTW, that's why we recommend sections to run no longer than 74 minutes.
Resampling does reduce the quality somewhat, I recon, but not enough that our listeners would mind. Ruin? Nah...
I record in 24 bits if I can, just so noise cleaning and amplification work more precisely. I am not convinced that 16 or 24 bits make any difference to the MP3.
tovarisch
- reality prompts me to scale down my reading, sorry to say
to PLers: do correct my pronunciation please
There's no benefit to recording at 48k. It will get converted to 44.1 when the MP3 is created and the additional bits are simply discarded. Same is true of recording at 24 bits. 48k is used mainly for video applications. Your mic is fine. The only real benefit of a shotgun is greater noise rejection, if that's a concern.