The M600 Universal Microphone Mount.

I’ve written here about noise problems I had in my voice-over studio in the past and how I solved them. They turned out to be low frequency rumbles that were fixed by weighting my microphone stand (cost: $0). Occasionally I still get a bit of rumble due to external noise creeping in, and I wondered what else I could do to address this. I sent an email to Enhanced Audio last month to inquire about the M600 and the owner, David Browne, called me from Ireland. As soon as I learned that one of his U.S. distributors is my beloved Mercenary Audio, I was on the telephone to my guy at Mercenary to order one. Since they’re in my home state of Massachusetts, I had the M600 in my studio the next day. It took just a few minutes to put it up, for which this impatient gal was grateful.

The verdict: it makes a difference. It’s hard to describe the difference, and if you visit the testimonials page at Enhanced Audio, you’ll find that few people make concrete statements about how their sound changed with the addition of this microphone mount to their studios - or at least, they don't base their impressions on the physics behind the change in the sound. I think a lot of people are mystified by it because the M600 is a solid structure, and audio engineers are used to shock mounts with rubber bands that supposedly allow low frequency noise to be dampened. My impression of the difference the M600 makes was certainly not based in science either. The way it struck me when I first used it was that it made the voice go from sounding two-dimensional to three-dimensional – and the silence between sentences is much more silent. I am very happy with it indeed. If Enhanced Audio also offered a mic stand to go with the mount I’d get one in a second.

U.S. consumers can get the M600 at Las Vegas Pro Audio as well as Mercenary. ElDorado Recording Services in Los Angeles may soon become a dealer as well.

Epiphany in Voiceover – What You Have is Probably Better than You Think

I have a cute little voice-over studio. It’s not beautiful, but it’s functional, the equipment is good, and it’s pretty darn convenient. And although it isn’t absolutely soundproof, it’s quiet.

Well, it wasn’t always quiet. In fact, until a few hours ago, I had a noise problem that I found very troubling. Most people didn’t seem to notice it, but some did, and I’ve tried a lot of ways of addressing it. I checked all my equipment. All my cables. I swapped out the video card in my computer in case it was causing problems. I replaced the sound card (that actually helped a great deal, and the problem was diminished, but not gone). I wondered if maybe there was something wrong with the house wiring. For a while I was considering buying a power conditioner to see if that might help, although for some reason never got around to it.

Recently, I started carefully examining the noise spectrographically. It’s only 10 Herz, in other words, very low frequency. If I amplified it, it sounded like a low rumble. Did I maybe have seismic activity in my neighborhood? Or was there perhaps something in the studio that was causing reverberation? The room is small, 5.5’ x 6’ x 8’, and treated with Sonex foam. What could possibly be causing reverb in this setting? I confess I was storing some things in the room that didn’t belong there – stuff that was on its way out of my life, waiting to be freecycled – so I stepped up the pace on freecycling and got it all out of there. Then I turned my attention to the things that do belong in my studio – the door, for example, which is not covered with foam, but rather with acoustic ceiling tile. Leaving the door open while recording would at least tell me if that flat vertical surface was having an effect – nope. Ackk!! What was left??

Finally, the beginnings of a compelling hypothesis – could my microphone stand be moving ever so slightly – it’s sitting on carpet, so possibly my own movements were causing micromovements in the stand, which my microphone was picking up???

Regardless of how it was happening, my microphone stand was indeed the culprit. Whether it was simply air movement or the effect of my own movements traveling through the stand, I don’t know. My dear husband suggested weighting the stand with some wrist weights we had gathering dust upstairs, and I put one at the base of the stand and one higher up, near the microphone itself. Then I made a test recording.

Well I tell you what, I thought at first that I had forgotten to turn my preamp back on, because my computer monitor showed a flat line. The only time I’ve ever seen a perfectly flat line here is when I’ve forgotten to turn something on or plug something in. But in fact, I WAS RECORDING!!!!! And what I was recording was silence – blessed, blessed silence. I never thought I would see this because after 3 years of enduring it I thought my studio was just somehow, inexplicably, inferior. Which of course is preposterous. Because, as it turns out, I have a cute little voice-over studio. It’s not beautiful, but it’s functional, the equipment is good, and it’s pretty darn convenient. And although it isn’t absolutely soundproof, it’s really, really quiet.

A very happy new year!