The right mic for this?

I'm using my ursa mini 4.6k as a recording device and the audio is displaying hiss after uploading the wav file to my computer. I was monitoring on the MM1 with my headphones and I could hear the hiss there already. If it's ok, i will upload a small wav of what i recorded so that you or anybody else can try it. My recordings have the voice metered at -40dbs. I have to push it in post, otherwise it would be too damn noisy...
 
Rick R said:
"Is this normal behavior from such a great preamp as the MM1? "
- Not normally. I've used an MM1 with a 416 and MKH50 for a boom op and never noticed a noise issue, unless it was acoustical. Is the hiss coming through the MM1's HP output? Could be an unterminated monitor return, if that's turned up. If it's happening after the fact, your playback system may not be set up correctly. What file format are you saving the recording as.. a 48k/24 bit PCM file is usually the standard for video projects... and what are you saving it too? A DSLR or low budget recorder will usually be noisy regardless of what's upstream. A monitor system will exhibit some kind of hiss when the levels are pushed to the extreme.
Click to expand...

Btw, Rick how much gain do you usually use on the mm1 to get a good dialogue wave form when using it with a condenser mic?
 
"how much gain do you usually use on the mm1 to get a good dialogue wave form when using it with a condenser mic?"
- It depends.. some folks speak louder than others so there's no one-setting-fits-all. Generally... as much as it takes to get the recorder's input levels to peak around -10dBFS or so. I've had a MM1's and other SD preamp's gain maxed out more than once for 'low talkers'.

"My recordings have the voice metered at -40db"
- If that's full scale levels (dBFS), it would explain the hiss when you normalize (boost) it to usable levels.. especially with 16 bit files, which I assume is what your ursa mini records. You could probably get away with it boosting 24 bit audio, but not 16 in the -40dBFS range.
 
Thanks Rick. I didn't want to boost much more in the MM1 because I was already hearing so much hiss from the headphones that I stopped at 50dbs. Anyway, I tried to remove the hiss in post and it actually works really nice. Any inconvenient with removing hiss in post?
 
guys, the strangest thing just happened. I got all the audio into Davinci Resolve to select the bits of audio I wanted and exported as 24bit audio without changing anything else. Now I imported it into Audacity and I can normalize it to -12dbs without boosting the hiss... But if I do the same in the original audio, I get a lot more hiss... does this make sense?
 
There are a couple of different types of normalization, typically "peak", use the highest amplitude sample and raises all to the desired level based on that. For instance if a file's highest amplitude sample is @ -10.0dBFS and the target is -1.0dBFS, everything would be raised 9.0dB.... and since the target level usually can't exceed -0.00dBFS, so it's relatively foolproof.
OTOH, "RMS" or "average" normalization uses a compression type of algorithm which can produce noise, breathing and other unpleasantness.
 
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