Multimedia reporting: Everything starts here

Yesterday I was walking around campus with headphones on, talking to myself, testing some new microphones. It reminded me how simple learning audio is — really, all it takes is practice.

The trouble is, people always think they are too busy to get started. They put it off and put it off.

When my colleagues come to me for training, I’m often surprised that they haven’t even tried recording audio yet. So I’m going to urge you to try. Just try it!

Ideally, you will plug in a proper microphone and headphones and walk around, like I did. You’ll be surprised by what you hear through the headphones.

Then copy the file to your computer and listen again — with headphones. This is how you will begin to learn how to get good audio.

I discovered that the noise of a water sprinkler 15 feet away wasn’t distracting at all. But in a particular stairwell, a horrible dull roar of some kind make the recording unusable. When I was in the stairwell, I heard the dull roar through the headphones. I couldn’t figure out what it was, so I took them off — and I couldn’t really hear it anymore. But in the recording, the noise was there — and it was bad.

Students hate to wear headphones when they are recording, but it’s one of the best things you can do to ensure that you get clear, usable sound.

As for the mic tests, I’ll probably post them here later today. The mics were the Electro-Voice 635N/DB (about $100, my favorite; similar to the 635AB), the Nady SP-4C (a ridiculously low $10), and the crazy-cheap ME-15 lavalier from Olympus. See my Audio Resources page for details, tutorials, etc.

Both the lavalier and the Nady were new. MultimediaShooter has been recommending the Nady for a while now, and my friend Mark Johnson has battle-tested them on his photojournalism students at the University of Georgia. I found the sound quality pretty good in comparison with the EV 635, but I got mic-handling noise much more often with the Nady. That’s going to be rough on the students; they get more mic-handling noise than they ought to even with the EV 635. (I tell them again and again not to move their hand on the mic, and especially, do not hold it at the connection to the cable!)

What I need now are some cables. The Nadys come with a 15-foot cable, but what we need is a 3-foot cable. At B&H these are $9, which seems a little silly for a $10 mic! Anyone have any ideas? (Please don’t suggest that I make my own.)

The ME-15 was surprising good for the price (about $20). I discovered that plugging it into the Line In port on my MacBook Pro yields much-too-quiet results; my friend Craig reminded me that a Line In (rather than a Mic In) will always do that to you (oh, yeah, right) and recommended that I lay out $40 for the Griffin iMic, a USB audio adapter (it also works on PCs). Problem solved! I recorded a test as a big garbage truck was screeching and thumping outside the window behind me, and all I heard on playback was my own voice. The ME-15 needs to be pinned a little farther down on the lapel than many lavaliers (or else playback is too loud), but otherwise it’s quite satisfactory.

The trick to getting nice audio is doing little tests like this on your own. If you know what your equipment needs to work at its best, then you can adjust.

Update (1:30 p.m.): Here are the audio tests.

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