Fig. Omni-directional powered stereo pair from Giant Squid Audio Lab.
I decided to try my hand at Podcasting the NYC Smalltalk user meetings which I basically organise and have done for a number of years now. Smalltalk is a programming language, very powerful, simple and cool and used in just about every sector of industry imaginable. Its a niche but like my music I like niches. So I have something to Podcast and I have the tools to Podcast i.e. Adobe Audition which earned some recent noteworthy mention at Podcasting conference out in the west coast. As a matter of fact I believe it won whatever the competition was. I can dig that up if somebody cares.
There were some technical logistics to conquer though. Well, I at least imagined them. A simple mono mic was not going to do. Our meetings are somewhat chaotic with folks talking out of turn, popping questions left and right. I really needed a mic situation that would really capture the room and not just the speaker. Secondly, our presentations go for a hour plus so I needed something with a fairly large storage capacity. Of course, there was the production of the podcast. Certainly, the recording was going to need some editing. Bring the content down to a PG-13 level. A fair amount of cursing goes on. I’m told that its mostly me but I just think they are too freaking sensitive. However, never mind editing , I was going to need to bring up levels , get rid of ambient noise and possibly interject where the presentation got confusing. So to summarise I needed:
- A stereo omni-directional mic — decided on Giant Squid Audio Lab.
- A recorder — decided on my iAudio X5, stuff like this was too over the top for my purposes.
- Editing software — decided on Adobe Audition which I already use for my personal music projects.
But there was one other snag. The iAudio external mic connection is actually a line level connection and that meant I was going to need a mic preamp.
This unit is sold at Microphone Madness, it actually comes with a built in mic. Not sure yet what type of mic but it will itself take an external mic.. In anycase, I already have the omni mics. I don’t believe that anything else will quite do the trick, not for my application. BTW, a secondary use for all of this will be that I can also now record my collaboration sessions with my composition partner Jon Raney. Those sessions include music which this setup should be able to handle well.
Why the iAudio external mic connection is actually a line level connection and that meant I was going to need a mic preamp?
cheaper units don’t use line levels for their mic ins so therefore one could hook up a mic directly i.e. no mismatch, but since the IAudio expects line level I therefore needed a mic preamp to bring up the level of the incoming mic signal up to the expected level