Mastering the PASport VO – The Ultimate User Guide

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Let's go. Welcome. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hello, everyone. To the Pro Audio Suite. These guys are professional. They're motivated. With Tech the VO Stars. George Witton, founder of Source Elements. Robert Marshall, international audio engineer. Darren Robbo-Robertson and Global Voice. Andrew Peters, thanks to Triboo. Austrian Audio, making passion heard.

Source Elements, George the Tech Witton and Robbo and AP's international demos. To find out more about us, check the ProAudioSuite.com. Line up, man. Here we go. And welcome to another Pro Audio Suite, thanks to Tribooth. Don't forget the code TRIPAP200 to get $200 off your purchase. And Austrian Audio, making passion heard. Now, we've been talking a lot about our Passport VO. George has been busy with a few crayons, knocking up an instruction manual.

So when you get your Passport, there'll be a card inside that is a quick start guide, and it's going to have two sides. And hopefully, it'll get you through a lot of the settings, what they are and what they do. And for some of you, that will be fine because you are good at interpreting these things. But not everybody is going to interpret them quite as easily. So I thought, you know, what do I usually do with my clients when I set up their gear? I make sort of like a recall snapshot.

I used to intern at a studio, and I had to use a recall book. It was a three-ring binder where I had to write down and mark the position of every freaking knob on the console. Photos of each thing. Oh, my gosh. No photos because this is before digital cameras. This is sort of the equivalent of that, except there's way fewer knobs to worry about on a Passport. So here's sort of an example of what that might look like right here. This should be the default mode.

I was thinking, like, what is the most common use case for a lot of the folks using it, being voice actors, being a lot of those folks who have bought one? What would the settings be ideally? And this is what I came up with, and this is what I'm hoping the default positions will be on the unit, right? So, you know, it's all the things that most voice actors would probably want. It's assuming you're going to use one computer and connect it with two cables, right?

So the left one's recording, right one is communication. And it's kind of confusing. It says connect to recording PC Mac, but that's because there is only one computer. You know, it's just a single computer. But that's the intention of this particular setup. Do you guys see anything you would improve or change, or is that pretty much clear? No, the only thing I saw that we talked about before was the input power. Just explain that, which it's now explained.

You can set to record USB or comms USB. Yeah, that power switch could be in either position, honestly, because if you're going to plug it into, let's say, a powered hub or two ports on a computer, both of them are supplying power. This will let you choose which of those you're using for power. Well, I caught myself out there without the labels on the bottom of ours. I forgot that that was something you had to switch. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right.

Our current prototypes are rather minimal on the labels right now. And I'm sitting there going, why is it working on one side and not on the other, and getting really frustrated. And then I emailed you guys, and you reminded me, and I went, ah, yeah, that'd be it. I know. I made an RTFM joke, and then I was like, oh, there is no effing manual. There's no manual. Okay, so comp off. It looks like the knob is in the on position there. Yeah, in the picture it's in the wrong position.

But comp off, I kind of agree. Although it is quite a good compressor, actually. It sounds nice, doesn't it? I really like it. It's so subtle, but it really does kind of catch it at the top and really keep you from going over the rails. Do you know the other one, and this is completely off subject. Well, it's not off subject because we're looking at it, but the high pass filter I had my doubts about, but I've got to be honest, hearing that in place, too, I don't mind it either.

It's all very subtle. Absolutely. We talked quite a bit about it. I was kind of thinking a little more aggressive on the high pass filter. We thought it was too soft. Yeah, we all had that same thought, going, that's not going to do anything. But I've got to be honest, turn it on and hear it, you've got to go, Michael, you're the man. Yeah, absolutely. Because there's a lot of things you can do with an EQ with terms of where the frequency starts to slope off and how quickly it slopes off.

Okay, so my question then for Robert and Robbo is, if I was using one of these for a session, would you be offended if I had the compressor on? No. And as I said in my video, when I did my unboxing, I think that's why, is because it's been set up with the understanding that sometimes you do need a compressor, but there's going to be no heavy-handed result in using this one. That's right. So the compressor will not actually do a thing.

If your gain is on the lower side, if you're not hitting the input too hard, the compressor never really kicks in. And as far as I can tell, based on the behavior, because Robert and I played with it quite a bit, we were purposely trying to clip the recordings, we were doing a lot with it, and it seems to be, is it a new compressor? It's a soft knee. So it has a curve. Yeah, it curves more and more as you get into it.

So at the very top, it's almost probably, I dare say at the very, very top of it, it might be approaching limiting. I'm not sure what it is. Because I think it's a two-to-one compressor, but with a knee, there's no exact like, boom, it's this ratio. It's sort of a sliding, you need calculus to know the exact ratio at that point in the curve. It is very subtle, but useful. And I think if you just keep your levels conservative, it's good.

The other nice thing is that if you look, right around the ring of the mic one knob, you actually have a compression indication. You can see when you're triggering it. It's an Easter egg. It's great. Yeah, so when we were playing with it, you could see the compression light indicating compression was happening, and it was kind of glowing in the space between the mic gain and the mix knob below, you could see it. A good tip would be, I reckon, set your levels up with your compressor off.

So find the levels you want to use and then turn it on. Don't set your levels up with it turned on. I'll tell you exactly why you want to do that. Because the meter is post-compressor. Yes. And that is a little bit hard to tell. And if you're like, I can't get enough gain, you keep on turning it up, then you might be kind of pushing it. So it's not a bad idea to set your level pre-compressor. But overall, just be conservative with your levels.

We've been through that whole thing with like 24-bit. Yeah. You know, this thing's got fabulous audio specs anyway, so you don't have to be hanging out at minus 2 or even minus. Just hit this thing with one yellow light at the most every now and then. Absolutely. And that's more than enough. Yeah, you know what? Unfortunately, this image, this is not the calibration of our meter, by the way. I'm sorry. This is out of date. So the current model actually is as shown here.

I'll zoom in on my – it goes from 0 to minus 6. I would say when you set your gain, you should be landing between 12 and 6. That would be what I would recommend. Yeah, like hitting minus 10. So is minus 10 a yellow, or is it a green? Minus 12 is a yellow. And then you have a minus 6 yellow, and then this is red. Zero is red. Yeah. Okay, so yeah. You should never see that red light. Yeah, you don't want to see that. If you see a red, you're dead. So minus 12 is the first yellow, right?

Correct. Yeah, I would consistently hit the first yellow and rarely hit the second. Yeah. You should just be flicking into there. Yeah. All right. So that minus 6 is really a minus 12. That's correct. Yeah. I'm sorry. This is not current. Yeah, hit it with one yellow light, but really – and then the second yellow light is minus 6. So just very occasionally hit the second yellow light. Right. And never red. Never red. When you hit the red, you're dead.

Because I think the compression probably starts around minus 12 or minus 10 probably. We should know that. Yeah. So the compressor – yeah, the compressor does come in around minus 10 if I remember. So it's – yeah, the compressor is there to catch you when you're a little bit too aggressive on the mic. Yeah. And it seems to hard limit eventually. I don't think anybody that's recording you will even know you're using it unless you actually really yell and get into it.

It's not a compressor for color. It's just a don't clip. It's transparent. And it really did stop it from clipping. I mean, I remember George was yelling into it, and then if you yelled into it without the compressor, it would clip. It would flatline and twisted wave. And then you yell into it with the compressor, and it was just rounded out. And it did kind of sound like it was getting fuzzy, a little furry, but it wasn't like that is unusable.

It's also because there's so much headroom in the AD converter. Is that where the headroom would be, the AD converter, or before the AD converter? But there's a lot of headroom. I'm assuming that the zero on that clip light is zero on the AD converter as well. Yeah. I just found that I was able to go beyond clipping and twisted wave playback, and I couldn't really hear the clipping. That's what a lot of you will be using, and that's hopefully what it will come out of the box with.

So the next one is Voice Actors Studio recorded PC and comms on a different computer. Not many people are probably going to do this, but a few may. If you have your recording PC, for example, firewalled, like literally not plugged into the network, if you don't have your PC that you record to plugged into the network for security, privacy, or whatever reason, this is what you'll be doing. And so you'll have a second computer or device that you'll use for communication.

Or if you want to use your phone for comms. Yeah. Well, that's a bit tricky, the phone thing. So that was one thing that Robert and I spent a fair amount of time tinkering with. Actually, I was sitting on the sofa with this thing in my hand, and I was going, how do I get mobile communication on an iPhone to work with this thing? And what we learned was that if you load an application that is designed to speak to an external input, This is on a mobile device. On an iOS device. Yeah, not Android.

I think Android doesn't have this issue, but I have not yet had a chance to test this with an Android, so I need to do that. I do have an old LG V40, so that might be a good test platform.

What we found was that when we loaded a recording app that does actually call out and connect to external devices, like I was using Road Reporter, a free little app you can install on your iPhone, it would immediately detect the unit, and it would show on the Road Reporter that I'm connected to the Passport VO comms port. Mom's or uncle. Then I would launch Zoom. And Zoom also said, hey, I'm connected to the Sentrance Passport VO comms port. So it does work if you do it in that sequence.

So screw you, Apple, we found a way around you. We worked around an annoying iOS limitation. I'm going to call it a limitation. So that was very encouraging. So in other words, you could plug your phone into that second comms port and you'll be fine. Just make sure your phone isn't sitting next to the mic, so you don't get that static-y sound you get from a cell phone near your mic. I didn't notice any of that. I had my phone all around it, and I don't think I noticed it.

This is a lesser-used configuration, but still one that's really relevant. This is almost the same as the first one, except now you've separated your record and your communications device. Right. Otherwise, it should be identical. Yep. And that's where this thing is so powerful, because it's like two, one, you can do it all. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, I'm looking. I'm clicking back and forth to see what's changed. It's like the world's war. Where's Waldo?

Oh, you know, it says here, blends mix between mics and DAW sent to guests and headphones. Blends mix between mics and DAW sent to headphones. It also controls what the guests hear. So when you're using the mic playback blend while listening to it back, that determines what gets sent out down the comms line. Yeah. Because they hear what you hear. They hear what you hear. If the switch is on the far right side, the bottom right switch.

Yeah, the comms source mic playback to send DAW playback to remote guests on Zoom, that switch has to be in the right position, which that's the way I would say almost everybody is going to want to use their passport. And which is, I just want it to play back automatically. I don't want to have to think about it. Yeah, that was the thing that caught me. I was looking for something far more complicated when I was trying to do playback. When Robbo and I were playing with it.

Yeah. Yeah. If you have a DAW and for some reason you are listening to yourself through the DAW, then you could create a potential comb filtering, where it's like if the DAW has a little bit extra time than the direct mic that you're feeding them, and if you don't mute your DAW, if your record is not muted and it passes through in real time, then you could be doubling up. You'd have to turn the playback knob all the way to playback, and that will eliminate that. That will eliminate that.

Yeah, you'd have to turn it all the way one way to eliminate it. I don't know many voice actors who monitor through the DAW, like through a Pro Tools, but I'm sure some do because that's how they do their punch and roll. You wouldn't want to be confidence monitoring. I would rather be confident in everything that I want to go to take. Do you confidence monitor what you record through the mic as an actor? I don't know. That's what I'm asking. I mean, I do when I record podcasts.

I confidence monitor. So you're not hearing the latency. Yeah. Like in Twisted Wave, there's an option to pass it through in real time or not, right? Yeah, it's playthrough monitoring. But you don't want that as an actor. It's distracting. Yeah. You're going to want to have playthrough monitoring turned off on whatever recording application you're using. In Pro Tools, it's called low latency monitor mode. So you want to go to your options menu at the very bottom. Yeah, but that's got a problem.

So Pro Tools is pretty stupid. Yeah, I said that. When you flick on low latency monitoring mode, you can't have any plugins. Well, you can't have them run live, no. It will bypass all your plugins. Well, because plugins induce latency. So, yeah, that's why. If you're a voiceover artist, would you want to be recording with plugins on anyway? I don't know. Well, you might have Nexus or something else going so that you're doing routing and some other stuff. Ah, good point. Yeah, I suppose.

You could feed that from another auxiliary. You could feed that from somewhere else. You don't have to have it coming through your mic channel. As long as that's in your monitor path, it's going to bypass it, unfortunately, the way Pro Tools does it. The point is, don't monitor through your DAW if you're using the playback option. Yeah, when you have zero latency monitoring hardware like this, don't monitor through the DAW. Yeah, just use it. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And then moving on, podcaster studio mode. So this is being a podcast producer slash podcast host, really, and having two mics in the studio with you. Local. This is probably one of the more simple modes because you're not using the comms port at all. You can have it plugged in, but you're not going to use it. This is more like, I'm just a regular audio interface. Yeah, this is essentially, I'm a Scarlett 2i2. Yeah. Yeah, just a stereo two-channel record interface.

Well, I keep saying Scarlett because it's such a popular device, but it's still way beyond a Scarlett because we've got high-pass filtering. We have compressors. Limiter. Yeah, yeah. So in this mode, now we're going to split the record channel to source switch to the middle position because we want to record the right mic on the right track or the right channel, right? So, George, what you should use the comms for is for your broadcast out live to YouTube live and Facebook live.

Okay, that would be a new mode. We can make another one called live stream. Like record and broadcast. Yeah. Yeah, I would call that live streamer mode, actually. Right? Because that's a whole other audience of users, which are live streamers. Actually, there's another function here as well. When you're using two microphones like that for a podcast, you can also use the auxiliary out to run another pair of headphones. So you've got two headphones. Oh, yes. Yes, you can.

Yeah. So you're going to use your aux out in headphone mode, and you'll connect your second headset to that. Yeah, so you really want to have the aux out in headphone mode so you can have two sets of cans. Now, the headphone knob will be controlling the levels to both sets of cans. So make sure that the two sets of cans are similar, like either the same brand or similar impedance. Is that the case?

Yeah, because you're going to have one person with much louder cans than the other, and that could be a little frustrating. So when you flip that to headphone mode, the speakers are only the speakers, right? Okay. Right. Yeah. The speaker outs are only the speaker outs. And then I would almost guarantee that compressor on for a podcast is the way to go. You just never want to have to worry about clipping in a podcast. And pretty much everything else is set.

You do want to make sure that you select mic one with your mic select, because if you put it on mic two, you're basically going to record two copies of mic two. Yes, exactly. Mic two on the left and mic two on the right. To the right, yeah. Which you'll figure out. But that's just, I put that on there to make sure that was really clear. Don't do that. So that is podcaster studio mode. Moving on, then we have podcaster studio remote guest mode.

And so this is when the guest is actually on some remote recording tool, right? So this one is, again, similar to VO mode, but this is all about recording the guest as well. So pretty much everything the same as if you're doing a voiceover job. But now you've got the comms knob that you control the volume from the guest.

And if you happen to have two people in studio with you, which probably not very likely if you're doing a remote, you probably won't use the second headphone jack, but it's there. And then you're going to connect your second USB port to your second computer. If you had a second person in the studio, they wouldn't be heard by the guests who are remote. Well, if they're on speakers, they won't hear it. Well, even if they're, it's not going to send mic two to comms.

It's only going to send mic one to comms. That is correct. Yes. So you can't really have two people in the studio and unless they're just kind of hearing you through your mic. That is a design limitation. Just turn their gain down and get them to speak loud. That's fine. And they'll spill into your mic. The other thing about this mode, George, is that how do I record the guests?

I need to hook up two recording applications because I'm coming in on the record interface and the other people are coming in on the comms interface. You just record a stereo track because remember the comms return is being sent to channel two, the right channel. So you see the switch that says set comms for right channel. Oh, does that right channel go out? Of course, it goes out the recording. Yeah. So you set comms for right channel only when recording.

And I put in parentheses only when recording in stereo, folks. So if you want to record both you and your guest, you have to record a stereo track or two tracks in your DAW if it's two mono tracks. So there's no way you're recording that second mic. Even if you put up that second mic, the comms aren't hearing it and you're not recording it. So it's really not a use case to have two people in studio and one remote. You can either have two in studio or you and the other person remote.

But this isn't like the full guest and five people in studio kind of interface. Right. Because this thing's got so many modes, sometimes we had to choose our battles and we couldn't do that. The main point is like a voiceover person who might occasionally record an interview. And maybe that interview is local or maybe that interview is remote. Or you want to record your clients. Or your client, yeah. You told me to read it faster with a smile. See?

So mode five is using only mobile device field recording or reporting. So this would be if you literally are going to use only a mobile. No PC, no laptop, nothing. Just plug this thing, mobile device, go out in the field. That's this. Record. It'd be great to have Mike's little microphones. Yes. Those things are pretty slick, man. I do have them here in these little sacks. But when I do that with the Micwalk Pro, as we've seen before, I just jam the mic straight into the unit.

And then record on Twisted Wave on my telephone. That's right. That's right. Absolutely. So this is the one thing that's going to be very different here is you need to power the unit. So you have to have a power bank plugged into the comms port. And then you will switch your power source switch to comms. Yep. So that's something you have to do. My little anchor has got a USB-C and an A so you can power a phone and a passport simultaneously. No problem.

If you want to power your phone while you're recording, you can't because you've only got one input. Unless you've got those weirdo T jacks. Yeah, some strange thing. So on iPhone, you have to use, it's called an MFI, made for iOS adapter. And they make one that has a USB -A port, which is a USB 3.0 jack, and a USB-C port for charging. So when you use that little adapter, now you can charge your phone and run a signal to the passport. So Andrew, that's what you're saying.

Those adapters are $30 range. I think that's what Apple sells them for. It does turn it into a little power splitter so it has that additional benefit. So you have that available too. The comms mic, mic playback switch, it's not being used because we're not using comms mode at all. Compressor on if needed. Again, that depends on what you're doing. Probably most of you would probably use that. Comms knob doesn't do anything because we're not using the comms.

So it's a really more simplified mode of operation. I'd actually have the, because if I'm using this on the phone, historically, I will be probably recording in a car or not a particularly good environment. So I would have the high pass filter on for sure. For sure. Yeah. Good point. Yeah. And lastly, just so you're aware, there are limitations on mobile devices. You will not be able to connect on Zoom and in your recording app on your mobile device at the same time. Can't be done on an iPhone.

Android? I don't know. Got to test that out. I don't think so. But the phone can only act as a communications device for making calls or Zoom calls or whatever. Or a high bit rate pro audio recording device. It can't do those two at the same time. Just to be aware of that. So moving right along. This one is camera sound kit. And this is definitely a very edge case use for the Passport VO.

But if you wanted to use it as a portable mic input preamp mixer for ENG or film production or whatever, that's this. So this would be assuming you're not connected to a computer at all. You have the option to do so. But this would be assuming it's not connected to any PC or anything. It's only connected to a power bank. And then the aux out goes to your camera. And depending on what kind of camera you have, you'll have to be very careful of what you set the speaker knob to.

Actually, no. No, this is headphone mode. This is in headphone mode. So you can't change your headphone volume because you will be changing the record volume. That is true. Can't you set it to speaker though? No. They won't have the microphones on it. That's right. Speaker will not pass the microphone signal out of the speaker jack. So that way there's no feedback. That is our feedback prevention thing. So we didn't want to have yet another switch to have another mode.

You can still monitor on headphones. You'll have your headphones plugged into the headphone jack. But the volume that you hear in the headphones is going to be predicated by the signal you need to send out to your camera. So keep that in mind. Your headphone volume is your camera gain. Yeah, kind of. So if you've got a good camera with a variable line input, you might find a perfect sweet spot where the headphone level is solid. And then you can trim your camera input until everything matches.

If your camera has got a micro input level only, you're going to have to run that really low. I would suggest that if your camera passes audio in real time that you're better off monitoring through the camera so you can hear what you are doing to that camera input gain. I agree with that entirely. Because who knows what you've got there. You've got a preamp on there.

And I've seen it before where you're clipping something, but you're clipping it so early on that it's actually not going into the red. It's just in the green zone. You're clipping the input of the camera, but not clipping the DAC on the camera. You're not clipping the digital recorder. You're clipping the analog stage. And that's a combination. It's in the green. It's okay. It's like, nah, you didn't listen to it. Yeah, so that is a very good point.

And this was something I learned from doing production sound mixing way, way back is I had a cable that had a monitor return on it. It was like a snake, you know, and that would run out to the camera. And it had a signal returning from the camera all the way back to my mixing rig so I could hear what was coming off the camera. Because that is the most important thing. I've gotten this request.

They send me the video, and it's some guy talking, and the camera's like 15 feet away from him, and he's got a lav on, and it sounds like he's 15 feet away. Because the camera person who's got XLRs on his camera didn't switch his camera to XLR input. And it's just getting like the built-in crappy shotgun. Yeah, and let this be a lesson. Looks like meters. Always record a backup. Always record a backup. Or don't just look at meters. Listen. Yeah, and record a backup.

Like when I was doing production mixing, even if we ran audio straight to cam, I would always record a backup to a DAT at the time. That was how long ago it was. But this thing, you can use your phone as the backup, right? You can plug your phone into the record port, and that could be the backup recorder, right? So you got you covered. Again, how many people are going to be doing this on this device? I don't really know. It's the photographer VO professional.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of people do more than one job. Let's face it. That's how this business goes. All right, two more to speed through. This one is the producer's studio. So this is Robert. This is Robbo. This is them engineering and just wanting to have the ability to communicate with the talent in the booth. And that's what this mode is for. And I also threw in the record on PC1, comms on PC2, because I figured some producers are like, I don't let the Internet touch my doll.

It's a separate computer. So that's kind of what this mode is. What do you think? This is one that you would use probably, Robert. Yeah, and it's kind of clever. You can use the second mic input as your talkback in the control room. You got that mic, so you got your talkback mic. You have your talent mic. You have your speakers. You have your talent headphone.

And in this case, so the one thing that would be interesting is that you as the engineer, because you're listening to speakers, you're going to want to pass the talent through your DAW. But the playback that goes to the talent, you're not going to want to have that knob switched over to mic. So the talent will want to hear the mic. You'll probably have to flip that mix knob back and forth a little bit. The mic playback knob?

Yeah, because you want to hear the talent, so you got to listen through the DAW. But then you don't want the talent hearing them twice. So you only want the talent to hear the DAW when you have something to play for them. And the only way to do it is to flip that back and forth. So this knob here, you would, let's see. So while tracking or while recording, you would turn it to mic? While recording, you would turn it to mic. The speaker output is always the output of the computer.

Then you basically keep that over to the left while recording and to the right while playing back.