• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

All-in-one solution for recording 1 mic and phone?

petsy

petsy

Looking for a small, "as portable as possible" solution for recording at least 1 mic and a phone. So basically a small mixer with a built-in hybrid. I want it that way for space reasons. Also, I travel a lot. I've looked around and many of the field solutions seem to be focused on remotes, i.e. sending audio over the phone to a studio, not so much doing phone interviews. I've found a unit from Glensound (GS-CU012) and one from Axel (Oxygen 2) that seem decent but I'm not sure they offer the capability to record my voice onto a separate channel and the phone onto another. That is absolutely crucial for me as mixed audio makes editing to cumbersome. Solidyne has a unit called S500 that also seems nice, albeit a big bit but that's ok I suppose. Don't know the quality of the hybrid though. I will be using this to record interviews and voiceovers etc, in a home studio space.

So, to summarize: I'd like some buyer's advice on a small all-in-one unit with 1 or more mic inputs, a built in hybrid capable of good enough audio to produce professional radio content, the capability to record voice and phone onto separate channels and that's about it. Any advice? Price is not that big an issue as I want pro gear and I know it can be a bit costly. And yes, I want it all in one unit, not a rack hybrid etc.
 
If you understand the difference between 2-wire phone audio and 4-wire phone audio you'll know that the phone is a 'hybrid' audio source. At the phone you have 2 wires that are carrying both your audio and the caller's audio.

At the handset (and after the phone's hybrid circuit) you'll have 4-wire audio. 2 wires carrying your audio and another 2 wires carrying the caller's audio.

Find a breakout box that you can insert between the phoneset and the handset that offers separate audio jacks providing your mixer with two inputs....
 
Thanks, but I don't see how that would change the situation for any of the solutions I listed though.
 
Thinking off the top of my head, the JK audio mixer line might work. The units (I have a couple of the sport models) have a built in hybrid plus touch-tone telephone dial. Going by memory here...

I believe you can set up the monitoring feed just to hear mostly incoming telephone audio, while there is a separate output that just sends the mikes out to the line. You could then feed the left channel of your laptop with the headphone feed (phone audio) and the right channel with your local mike (the line out feed). A special built patch cord could do this--all the connections are on the back panel. After doing the interview, you would use your audio editing software to delete the "hybridy" audio in the left channel when you ask a question (leaving the incoming telephone audio) then mix the clean feed local mike down to mono for the finished interview.

Since this is a hybrid, your left channel audio would also have some of your local mike (send) feed when you ask a question so you would have to watch transitions as well as your "uh huhs" while listening to the caller. But that's a matter of technique.
 
You might be able to use a laptop computer, Skype out, and a USB mic, if you want to get creative. Record audio on different channels with Total Recorder in the telephone mode.
 
Yeah, I've tried that in the past, works ok. Probably will continue to use it to some extent although it's a bit expensive when calling abroad. I'm eyeing the Eela EA916 at the moment, seems to work the way I want it to. Real hybrids are a bit more reliable than Skype IMO.
 
Skype can definitely be quirky. You could also get a SIP client and an account with dial-out capability overseas. There are lots of creative ways to do things these days. POTS is great if you don't care about audio quality.
 
Yeah, it's an expanding field, for sure. I always go with a wired connection when Skyping nowadays though, wifi is totally unreliable. Might sound awesome at one point, only to crash completely and lose every other packet of data a second later. Wired works fine though.

Only problem (not really a problem though) I have with Skype is that it's sort of a new audio paradigm. I mean, radio used to have three basic types of sound. In-studio close-miked type audio, field audio with an omni mic etc, lots of ambience, a live feeling and then phone audio - people calling in etc. Those were basically the three types of audio you'd hear. Now, with Skype, you can get audio that's better than a phone (at least technically speaking) but still isn't anywhere near studio sound (or at least not as reliable) due to different mic types, bad rooms, bad mic technique from the caller etc. Which can make listening a bit confusing. As a listener, I want to know what kind of audio I am hearing. Am I listening to an in-studio person, a caller or what? Sure, these things will gradually become accepted but as for now, it's a bit of a paradigm shift.

That being said, I think Skype audio is worse than a POTS land line recorded with a good, professional hybrid. I'll take POTS over Skype any day, if nothing else for the reliability and the fact that all people have a phone, especially older people (who probably also have real land lines). POTS beats Skype. That is, if the caller is using a normal, lower-grade mic. POTS is also more reliable and the lo-fi aspect is a bit overstated IMO. POTS is frequency-handicapped, sure, but it's still good and clear.
 
Obviously you should use whatever you like and whatever works for you. However, with regard to Skype quality (and I do agree that you should only used a wired connection), Skype used a proprietary SILK HD audio codec. It has better than 8K audio bandwidth. POTs is, by design, limited to 3K.

For radio, you left out Marti transmitters. Our remotes in the seventies sounded better than Skype. Listeners never complained about the good quality. :)
 
Yes, perhaps I did leave them out.

Well, yeah to each his own I suppose, but Skype doesn't have better bandwidth if you call via Skype to a normal phone. Which you will be doing since you can't (and don't want to) ask your interviewees to sit in front of their computer (if they even have one) and Skype with you. And you never know what mic they might use if they do. So yeah, technically speaking Skype is better but there's a lot of "but's" so there's no substituting a POTS hybrid if you're a radio journalist IMO.

Btw, the Eela EA916 unit looks really, really good actually. Shame they seem limited to Europe, not many reviews around.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom