(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Y'all ready for your history? Get started. Welcome. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hello, everyone. To the Pro Audio Suite. These guys are professional, they're motivated. Thanks to Triboot, the best vocal booth for home or on the road voice recording, and Austrian Audio, making passion heard. Introducing Robert Marshall from Source Elements and Someone Audio Post Chicago. Darren Robert Robertson from Voodoo Radio Imaging, Sydney.
Tech to the VO Stars. George the Tech Whittam from LA. And me, Andrew Peters, voiceover talent and home studio guy. Line up, man. Here we go. ♪ Suck, suck the beat ♪ And welcome to another Pro Audio Suite, thanks to Triboot. Don't forget the code, T-R-I-P -A-P 200. That will get you 200 US dollars off your Triboot. And Austrian Audio, making passion heard. In fact, you're hearing my explosives quite well on my Austrian Audio at the moment. Sorry about that. Now, talk about microphones.
Are USB microphones up to snuff as far as being used for voiceover? Yeah, where did you hear about this topic? Was this off the Facebook group? It was on Facebook. I can't remember what group it was on, but someone was asking the question, you know, it's been, you know, I realized 10 years ago USB mics were a big no-no, but are we at a point now where USB technology has come far enough that, you know, USBs are more acceptable? I don't, you know, I don't know if it's more acceptable.
I think it still has a image of being unprofessional. So I think there's, I don't know if there's anything USB mics can do to get over that. And this is a dumb analogy, but I love analogies. This is like being a professional photographer, knowing how to be a great photographer, and then showing up with an iPhone 15 Pro and saying, this is my camera. And you're like, I know they can pull off a great photo with this thing, but it's not a pro camera. I feel like it's a similar thing.
It's interesting though, isn't it? Cause there's a couple of mics out there, good mics, like Rode have one and Shure have one that do both, that do XLR and USB-C. So it's not a matter of technology. It's not anymore, is it? That's the thing. It's all about eye candy, which is, you know, a lot of what studios are becoming these days more and more. It's like, does it look good as opposed to, does it sound good? I think it's two things. I think it's perception and I think it's practicality.
Yeah. If you work purely solo in your own little booth at home, USB or brain out, it's fine. Use your NT1, whatever you've got with USB, it's fine. When you have to work in a workflow with a production remotely, or if you have multiple microphones that you manage or switch between, USB is not the way to go by far. Or if you have to go any kind of distance, because USB, maybe 10, 12 feet or three meters, if you have a really long cable, maybe.
But other than that, once you go beyond that, forget it. It's not reliable. So you can't get a good connection. So like a lot of people have their laptop outside their closet, you know, and they'll have their mic in the closet. And they'll be like, I can't get a reliable connection to my USB. It doesn't matter whether it's a mic or an interface, same problem. And it's like, that's just because it doesn't do well over distance.
But you know, what does is a studio mic cable, an XLR balanced mic cable can run a very long distance, hundreds plus feet. Talking about that though, if you're using a USB interface, which many people do as opposed to outboard gear with an A to D converter. Basically, if the USB microphone has a decent capsule, then there really isn't that much difference between a standard XLR cable mic into a USB interface. Not really.
I mean, if you're comparing the entry level audio interface products, we'll talk about the Passport VO by the way, because I saw the circuit board. Yeah, yeah. The amount of componentry packed into that board is mind-boggling. It is nothing at all what you would see inside of a USB mic or a typical USB interface, like a Scarlett 2i2 for that matter.
Most of the componentry that run these devices are condensed down to a couple of ICU chips, just IC chips, just small chips that do the vast majority of the heavy lifting. And because of that miniaturization now, you're basically taking the function of a USB interface and packing it down into a little board and shoving it inside the body of the mic. And so there's no real inherent necessary reason the quality needs to be lower.
I think the first really good USB mic that I knew of or heard of was probably the Sennheiser MK4 Digital. That's when Sennheiser said, let's make a USB mic. And they partnered with, I believe, Apogee. So now you've got Apogee pre-easing converters in a Sennheiser mic. That's gonna be great. You know it. I mean, I've heard it and it sounds great, but it has absolutely no physical controls. It has no headphone monitoring. It's kind of like the Rode NT1, right? It just has USB. It's a microphone.
That's it, right? So it's pros and cons there. The other thing I tell people is like, imagine you're in a session, you're being directed and they say, you're a little bit soft. Can you give us a little bit more gain? And you go, yeah, sure, just a second. And you're flexing with the mic trying to find a gain knob. I'm like, how is that gonna come across on a Source Connect session? You know what I mean? Like, oh, your gain knob's on the mic, oh, okay.
Look, a little bit unrelated, but USB mic centric is, I live in a really musical street. I have my neighbor two doors down, who's a good mate of mine, a guy called Baz. He's a classically trained violinist who's actually now works as a builder because he couldn't get enough work as a violinist. And the other guy across the road, a guy called Richard, his father is a really famous opera singer and Richard now sort of writes and sings his own stuff as well.
In fact, he's got his own Spotify channel. But Baz, the violinist down the road, his son is a budding audio engineer and he's always recording his dad playing the violin when Baz is practicing.
So I took him down my Zoom recorder as an interface and gave him my OC -16 and the NTG-4 to play around with, to record the violin and sort of said, look, point the shotgun at directly at the violin and then use the large diaphragm mic to sort of, you know, muck around and record the room in different places and see what you can get. Yeah, the larger body sound. He's had it for about two and a half weeks and he brought it back on the weekend with the biggest smile on his face.
And I said, how'd you go? And he said, oh, I had so much fun. And so yeah, so it's kind of nice, but I can't imagine trying to record a violin on a single USB mic somehow. It can be done, but you know, any, if you don't know what you don't know, but a lot of people probably don't know that when a violin is recorded in a studio or any kind of performance, it's not just a close mic. That's not what gives you that classical music sound is when you close mic an instrument.
That's gonna give you a pop sound. Yeah, that's right. But not a classical sound. So that's what I was sort of saying to him is like, you know, play with the blend of the two and see what you come up with. So I'm yet to hear his recordings. I've asked him for them, but he's a little bit shy on that side of things, but I might have to talk to Baz and say, you've heard them, get a copy to me. Let me have a listen. I mean, there's a ton of innovation around USB mics.
I've had this cute little Tula mic, the T-U-L-A. We've talked about it on the show before and it's, you guys can't see it, but it's just a little, it's the size of a, I mean, it's half the size of my hand. It's about the size of my palm. And it's got a cute little folding stand and it has a few tricks up its sleeve, like built-in recording and USB simultaneous recording. It's very cool.
But in terms of feeling like a studio mic and something that you could feel like you're working professionally, could you pull it off? Yeah. Would you feel confident? I don't think so. Well, just hold it up again. I mean, can you imagine being on a Zoom call like this in a professional session and talking into that? I don't think so. Yeah, you guys have to look it up. T-U-L-A mic is what it's called.
It's very cute and a very well-designed thing, but it's just, it's so small and tiny and feels sort of kind of hobby -like, so yeah. And that's the problem, isn't it? That's the vibe that people get when you pull out a USB mic. It's a hobby-like. Yeah, hobby or podcaster or something, it's not at the echelon of voiceover when you pull out a USB mic.
And there's a very clever stuff going on, like RØDE has the RØDE Connect software that you can have four different USB mics all on the same computer and they all interface with each other like you have a RØDECaster, but it's all software, which is really clever. There's really cool stuff going on, but yeah. Austrian Audio have theirs as well, the Micreator.
The Micreator is a really cool packaging, very neat design with a slave mic that you can plug in and have a secondary mic for stereo pair and yeah, it's a real tough argument to say to somebody, if you're buying your first mic for your home studio, just get a USB mic. I would say it to somebody who you really don't feel is gonna be taking this seriously. You know, kind of kicking the tires, taking their first classes, you know, no acting background. They're just like, I wanna try.
Okay. You know, start simple, start cheap. Audacity in a USB mic. Anybody that gets really serious. Yeah, we leapfrog and go right to a studio mic. Well, the ultimate USB mic was the Sentrance MicPort Pro with the shotgun straight into it. The USB mic that isn't, but yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was perfect because like we've talked about before, the iPhone 15 has a USB-C port. So you go straight in and like I've been using it with Twisted Wave on my phone.
If I'm traveling, now that that's what I take, my Port Pro into the iPhone 15 and capture it on Twisted Wave. And you're using the CC8, you said? The CC8, which I really, really like the sound of it. So you don't bring the 416 anymore. You take the CC8 and... No, I don't. And the CC8, because the CC8's about probably... Smaller. Close to half the length, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, and the CC8 sounds fine.
It's the ultimate USB mic, really, because you've got physical controls over input, blend, output. You've got a really good preamp converters. You've got a proper headphone monitoring with a good headphone amp. And away you go. Sorry, you go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna say, it's just interesting that we're sitting here listening to the conversation and we're going, oh, USB mic. You know, no, no, no. USB interface, oh, that's okay. I know. It's like... Yeah, exactly. I know, that's the irony.
The circuitry is not gonna be all that different. It's just gonna be condensed into the smallest, simplest possible package. We used to say a USB preamp can't be any good because it's only getting USB power because there's only 500 milliamps of current. So there's a lot of limitations, but circuit design has come a heck of a long way. And yeah, we can do it now. And now a lot of products have gone USB-C, which allows for a higher amount of current.
I think it's 900 milliamps or something like that. So things can run on a lot more power and are just gonna sound better. You get more headphone amplification available to you when you have more power. Things don't fall apart, clip too quickly, more headroom. You know, that's another thing is like USB mics, they don't have much headroom. Like when you push them, they just sort of sound like a horrendous crunch. They just turn ugly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It turns really nasty here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's funny, I'm looking over here and I've got the SSL2, which is bus powered. Yeah. But the ID44, I'm assuming the ID24 and 14, the smaller one, I think that's what their names are. Well, I know the 44 is AC powered. It's a power supply, yeah. Yeah. And I'm pretty sure the other ones do. Maybe the smaller ones don't. I'm not sure, 100%. I think it has as much to do with the fact that it's four, it's got four mic preamps, right?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to really get an adequate amount of preamplifier power, phantom power, again, headphone amplifier, the internal mixing, all that stuff, yeah. You use up that 900 milliamps pretty quickly. Yeah, pretty quickly. Yeah. Yes, indeed. Whenever you pick up a USB interface, they're so light. And you kind of look at the, once again, the Mic Port Pro and look at the size of that, and it does everything and probably more than the SSL2. It does.
And takes up about an eighth of the real estate. The miniaturization is amazing. And as I touched on earlier, the Passport VO, by the way, because I saw the circuit boards, at least one picture of one of the boards, front and back, of what's inside. And that's one of, I believe Michael said, the four boards that go into the unit. I could be wrong on that. It is incredible, the packaging, to fit all the componentry.
Because I can't wait to get this in the hands of guys like Julian Krause and others who love to take things apart and look at what's going on and really see. I know it sounds good, it is good, right? But when you really see the work that goes into the circuit design and the componentry, you start to understand why this thing is gonna sound the way it sounds, what it does, and why it costs what it costs compared to the other things out there. Well, there's not a spare inch on the board, is there?
The question that comes from me for that though, right, is we're talking about the limitations of USB mics as this sort of overview of this session. But now we're sort of talking, we're getting to the point where we're just, we're talking about USB-C, more power. We're now talking about, you know, cramming circuit boards full of stuff.
So that then begs the question, looking forward, do we see a day when USB mics will become almost the norm because they will have the same capabilities as having a microphone, XLR microphone plugged into an amplifier or a preamp?
Well, if you look at the size of the OC-18 or 818 or 16, whichever one, you can see that the possibility of actually extending the bottom half of the microphone, so below the cage, there's a ton of real estate there to fill it up with all kinds of knobs and bits and pieces. So, and you get a beautiful capsule, great circuitry and it's USB.
I don't know, I'm not an expert in boards and all that sort of stuff, but I can imagine that surely we've got to get to a point where the technology is going to allow all this stuff that we're saying is a limitation is going to allow it to happen, surely. Well, the technology is there, isn't it? I mean, we've just talked about it with the miniaturization of the stuff that Michael does at Centrance.
I mean, the size of the Mic Port Pro is the size of the bottom of, well, it's not quite the size of the bottom of the OC-818, but it's not that much bigger, really. Yeah, I mean, what Rode's doing that clever is that each mic appears as a different unique mic with its own model number, or I guess number. So like, if you plug in two USB interfaces that have the same name and model and everything, now you're like, okay, which is which? How do I get the both of these to communicate to one DAW?
DAWs are designed to really see one set of digital inputs or one USB input, and that might be a multi-channel input. It might be a USB interface with eight inputs or 16 or whatever, but once you have literally separate AD converters all with their own connectors, they all have to talk to the same clock. They have to be in sync with each other.
That is definitely still a lot more difficult, and frankly, most people don't have a computer that are gonna accommodate more than four or five USB ports either. So there's the analog way of doing things with multiple mics into a board. Even if on the inside of the board, it's totally digital, which is way more common now, it's a whole different animal. So yeah, I think we're gonna be doing things the traditional XLR way for a long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree.
Funny hearing you talking about USB ports though, because I think we spoke about it earlier in the year. Beginning of the year, I went M1 Mac Studio, which I'm loving, by the way. But the interesting thing is, I had some trouble with my iLock the other day, and I thought my iLock had died, but it was actually the USB hub that I had it on. But I was looking at the back of my Mac going, all these pristine, beautiful USB -C ports, but it's converter, converter, converter.
Oh, that one's USB-C, converter is still living in the past. That is the one thing I'm missing out on with my Mini is really just the ports. I only get two C and two A ports. So that all feeds to a Thunderbolt dock with a million cables coming out of it. I mean, it is a mess. I'm looking at it right here underneath the shelf. It's a real mess, and it would be a little bit cleaner with the studio with a lot more jacks on the back. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I gotta tell you, I don't know if you've ever had that moment, because it's the first time I've ever had it, but I do have zero downtime, so I was kind of happy about that. But that moment when you go, oh, fuck, my iLock's not working. That heart in your chest, just your throat sort of feeling of, I can't work, I can't do anything. You literally, like your income, you live and die by that. Yeah, it's all hanging on that one little USB thing that just sits there.
For me, it's like, I gotta launch Source Connect. Is the iLock still working? Oh, yeah, it is, okay. Yeah, exactly, I know. It's the only time it fires up. And same thing happened to me, too. I had it plugged into a USB hub that just died one day, and I didn't notice until I launched Source Connect and it needed to use the iLock. And you're going, no authorization. You're going, what do you mean, no authorization? It was stupid.
Yeah, but okay, now I'm obviously a bit slow on this one, but I've got the two Source Connects. I've got one on the Mac mini, which has the iLock plugged in, but I'm also using this one right now on the laptop without an iLock plugged in. Because it's authorized to your computer and not to the iLock. You can authorize to your computer or you can authorize to the iLock. So you've got one authorized to your computer and the other one.
Well, the other one could be authorized to that computer, too, or it could just be on your iLock so you can take it with you. Yeah. Either or. Well, USB's not going anywhere. Thunderbolt is here to stay as well, but it's just relegated to much more expensive devices. So there might be someday a Thunderbolt microphone. I don't know, but what does Thunderbolt do? It basically looks like USB, except it just carries tons more data. Much, much more data.
Like, I think USB-C 3.1, whatever the hell standard, I think carries like five gigabits of data a second, which is fast. That's a lot. It's huge, isn't it? But Thunderbolt 4, I think, can do 40 gigabytes a second. So that's the realm of video and video people. The only thing out there that I use with any frequency are the Apollos, which uses Thunderbolt. The reason why Thunderbolt is so important for Apollos is the speed of the bus.
It's not just how much data can it squeeze, but it's how fast the computer can talk to the Apollo, and the Apollo can talk to the computer. The Thunderbolt port is the same equivalent speed as a PC card, PCI card, in the computer. Yeah, wow. It's the same speed communication, something like that. So that's why Thunderbolt is so unique, and a lot of people think they need it. They're like, I need a Thunderbolt dock. You probably don't.
If you're not doing very big video projects with tons of channels, you probably don't need it. But it's such a commonly confused protocol. Like I had a client who just got a dock. He assumed it must be Thunderbolt, since that same company makes Thunderbolt docks. Nothing that Thunderbolt would work with it. And I said, do you have a Thunderbolt symbol next to the jack? Does it literally have a little lightning icon on the plug? No, it doesn't. It's not Thunderbolt.
It's funny hearing you say that, people who want stuff that they don't need. I've noticed recently on Facebook marketplace and eBay and stuff, here in Australia, I don't know about over there, but all of a sudden there's been this splurge of Mac pros, like the cheese grater, the big, like specked out to the max. And I'm kind of thinking, okay, so it's either they're unreliable, which I highly doubt, or these people have gone, why did I pay all this money for that? I don't need this.
I could just grab a Mac studio and it'll do. I'm sure there's plenty of people that do need it. Let's be honest. Feature films, blah, blah, blah. But I can imagine all these cashed up voiceover artists, let's just say cashed up voiceover artists who've gone, oh, I might buy one of those. And then they've gone, I really don't need this. Yeah, I haven't run into it yet. I have not been to a studio or talked to a client who's running a new Mac pro, certainly studios.
Most people are on Mac minis and stuff, but a bunch of people are on studios too. How long have you had your studio? Beginning of the year, I got it, yeah. Do you ever hear the fan on it? No, never. It's pretty quiet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got the old Mac pro sitting down to the desk, which is sort of a server, which sort of just holds my final mixes and backups and stuff. But yeah, so that fan occasionally, but no, never. And I'm running, I used After Effects for our video stuff and Premiere.
I mean, nothing heavy in Premiere, but After Effects is pretty memory hungry. Choose through it fast, right? But it flies, it's just so fast. I don't need anything else. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you're good. Well, there you go. USB or what can we say? USB, not for me. To be USB or not to be USB? To be USB or not to USB, that is the question. USB, not for me. No, I'm on George's side. Still not yet, sorry. Me neither. Well, that was fun. Is it over? The Pro Audio Suite.
With thanks to Tribus. And Austrian Audio. Recorded using Source Connect. Edited by Andrew Peters. And mixed by Voodoo Radio Imaging. With tech support from George the Tech Whittam. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group. To leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say g'day, drop us a note at our website, theproaudiosuite.com.