;)
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Check out this WAV file (to download to your desktop)
OR this MP3 (this one will stream in your browser)
After the line by line comparision, you will hear the complete reads all the way through..... 1: 416 2: Tascam iM2 3: iphone built in mic. I am favorably impressed.
I set the volume almost wide open......with the limiter on the iM2 switched off. I worked it about 5 inches away to the side, at about a 75 degree angle, to minimize plosives and wind. I have ordered an extension cable, so that I will be able to read a script off the iPhone while recording.
You really have to be careful to hold the mic very still....it is very sensitive to movement and wind. Note: switch the iphone to "airplane mode" or you may pick up some RF noise, and be disturbed by notifications.
In either case, iPhone or iPad, you can start recording and multi-task.......that is, switch to the email client.....by double clicking the home button, and selecting the email icon. Twisted Wave will continue recording in the background with no problem, and will indicate this by the red bar notification at the top of the screen. You then return to TW at the end of your read by double clicking on the home button and selecting the TW icon.
You will not want to try to narrate a documentary with this, but certainly for tags and short promos.......it's not bad at all. And it may save your client's bacon when you are nowhere near a studio and they have an emergency. I had equally good results on the original iPad.
There are a couple of other interfaces in the pipeline that will allow us to use the 416 in the field with iOS ......but the ship dates keep getting pushed back.
In the meantime, for 80 bucks, and something that is truly pocketable, this is not bad at all.
As always,
Beauregard
Howard Parker (I call him Client Zero, my first voice over studio client), had me design him his dream studio in his Mother's townhome after she tragically succombed to cancer this year. He was incredibly fortunate that Verizon brought FiOS to his neighborhood at the same time, a huge blessing and cost savings over his dual T1 lines at his previous residence. The build went great, and the results are fantastic, but for one last hurdle... the ISDN.
EdNet books the Verizon installer for December 12th from 1-5PM, and I'm there. I work on whatever I can while I wait for the guy, but I can't leave to remove the equipment from Howard's old studio for fear that I might miss the tech's arrival. Unless you have Verizon mobile phone service, you can't receive even a text message at Howard's old place, so I wouldn't know if they guy tried to contact me. 5PM comes and goes, and no technician. EdNet calls Verizon, but their office is already closed.
I did book the following day as a contigency, darn glad I did. The installer was confirmed for Tuesday from 1-5PM. At Noon I get a call from my builder James Michael telling me the Verizon tech was already there. By some stroke of luck JM was at the location when the tech arrived, as he was supposed to be at another location. What transpired next was just pitiful...
You know things are going down-hill when the Verizon phone technician, who admitted he's worked for them for 35 years, isn't permitted to have a power drill in his truck. They let him bring a Yankee hand drill to use, that's all. I mean, seriously? That ain't gonna cut it when you have to drill through 12+ inches of studio wall, insulation, and stucco. JM had to go out and buy a long drill bit and handle the hole for the wire himself, and I am glad he was there to do it in the end because I don't want a single mistake when a hole needs to penetrate a very expensive sound isolating wall and side of a custom built cabinet.
The techician moped around for a few hours waiting for the home office to switch things on. I asked him what was the hold up and he said they didn't "build out" the ISDN network before he arrived, as they are required to do. Someone "had a question" and rather than seek out the answer, just sat on their thumbs and held up the job. Again, 5PM came and went, and we were left with a non-functioning ISDN connection. I can't go back today, but I did leave everything connecting so if the SPIDS we were given are actually correct (which there is no guarantee), everything should just work when they push the right buttons.
So, even with the proper planning, a respected ISDN provider handling the order (at great cost, mind you), an experienced technician, my builder, and myself involved, things still didn't go well. ISDN IS DEAD, and it's beginning to smell. OK, not dead, but dying...
]]>Many who have used Pro Tools for a while have experienced the dread after Mac OS has automatically updated and created problems. It's not a situation anyone wants to have. You walk into your studio in the morning, click the Pro Tools icon, and nothing happens. Pro Tools is extremely sensitive to the version of Mac OS running on your system. Unfortunately, so are iOS devices.
If you like to have the latest and greatest iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch device or iOS version from Apple, you'll find yourself in a situation where you need to upgrade several elements of your system to handle them. First you'll need to run the latest iTunes version available. This may require that you upgrade the OS to handle that request, which puts you in a bad situation. This also holds true for Apple's latest creation, iCloud.
iCloud attempts to keep all of your documents in sync between your different Macs and iOS devices. Like everything new that comes from Apple, they require that ALL of your devices have the latest OS running on them. iCloud seems great in concept, but it is a closed system that has many limitations, especially if you have any devices you want to sync that are not from Apple. It's sure to get better, but for now it's frustratingly simplified (in my opinion).
Consider a more flexible system such as Sugarsync, which I've used very successfully for over three years to keep my entire business in sync. I've yet to have it interfere with any software I use, and it works on Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android, and others. You can choose any folders on any of your systems you want to sync or share with friends or coworkers, which is very handy if you have an assistant handling some of your tasks!
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I guess she liked what I did because she had this to say:
No, thank YOU!
George Whittam
]]>Now, the rest of you smart people, here's my reasoning.
ISDN has been considered for over 15 years the gold standard for a voice actor's home studio connection to their client's studios. When it was developed the Internet existed, but we had no broadband access in our homes. At that time ISDN technology provided the fastest possible data connection mere mortals could access. Along came audio codecs, hardware devices that take analog audio and squash it down to digital information that will fit down a 128kb/s pipe. It worked well, it was state of the art, and many commercial and broadcast facilities invested in it.
For 10 years ISDN was king of the mountain, with no chance of being knocked off. But in the last five years high speed Internet access has become more ubiquitous, and new technologies have come along to dethrone the king. The advantage of using an Internet based system has always been flexibility and cost, but not reliability. It appears that the balance of reliability is starting to tip from ISDN to Internet.
My theory is based on a few factors. As of late more and more of my ISDN using clients are complaining of stability issues, dropouts, horrible blasts of noise, and increasing support challenges and costs for installation and monthly service. The TelCos, in the Los Angeles area Verizon and AT&T, clearly don't have ISDN users high on the priority list. Ordering the service is becoming impossible in some areas, finding someone to talk to when service outages occur is painful, and monthly rates only go up. Call at TelCo to order ISDN and you'll see where the acronym's interpretation "I Still Don't Know" came from. It's just not profitable enough for TelCos to promote the use of ISDN any longer, and it shows.
ISDN requires special systems to be in place outside of the user's building. It appears in the wall like a standard phone line, but what happens once that copper wire reaches the pole is completely unique to this system. There are network cards and switches that have been in service for many years, some of them completely dormant for extended periods due to a lack of user base. At least half of the orders I've had placed for ISDN have needed repair immediately upon fullfilment to be functional. These systems just get older and more neglected over the years, while the Internet backbone receives the focus and funding. It also seems more commonplace and accepted that ISDN codecs need to be rebooted and "futzed with" to get a reliable "lock" with the other user. We just get used to this over time, but there really should be no reason we have to deal with this.
Those of you who would be seriously put out if you lost ISDN service for more than a few hours, I seriously recommend putting a backup system in place. The technology that has done the most to establish itself in the voiceover industry as an ISDN alternative is Source Connect. For under $700 with iLok USB key you can install this software on any of your Windows or Mac computers. There are no monthly charges, no install charges, no long distance, and no per-minute fees when you connect to another Source Connect user. Even if you don't use it for 6 months, that one time you use it to bail out an ISDN fail will pay for itself immediately. If you are lucky enough to work with a Source Connected studio, be prepared for how incredible it sounds compared to ISDN!
There are a few catches to using Source Connect to replace ISDN. First, it can't connect directly to an ISDN codec. Internet and ISDN are completely independent of each other and don't speak the same language. If the client you are working with only has ISDN, you'll need to employ the services of a "bridge". One such service dubbed Out of Hear, created by DG Entertainment engineer Steve Nafshun, does nothing but ISDN bridging. His studio has four Telos Zephyrs connected to four ISDN lines, and multiple Source Connect accounts always at the ready to make your connection. Steve assigns you a pair of ISDN numbers to give your clients and agents, and a correlated Source Connect account. If your ISDN service goes on the blink, or you want to travel away from the confines of ISDN availability, call Steve and he'll patch you through. It's seamless for your ISDN using clients, only increasing the latency or delay by second or so.
Second, it does require at least a 300 kb/s upload and download Internet connection of good quality. While WIFI can work in the best of circumstances, Ethernet is highly recommended. Some hotels may only provide WIFI, so this can put you at greater risk for signal drops. Configuring the network may be required in some cases for a trouble free connection, but I've found it usually can make a connection without special setup like port mapping. In my point of view these are small prices to pay for a system that can be used anywhere in the world, with only a mic, USB interface, and lightweight laptop computer.
One of my clients, Pat Duke, decided to forgo installing ISDN completely when he relocated to Los Angeles a few years ago. Check out this video of his recent appearance on East West Audio Body Shop, as he describes his home studio and experiences using Source Connect.
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But how does this apply to you? If you are running a modern OS, at least Windows 7 64bit or Mac OS 10.6, your computer can handle 8GB (or more in some cases) of RAM. If you're still running a 32bit OS like Windows XP, your computer will only be able to address 3GB of RAM. Before I went to 8GB of RAM on my machine, I was routinely blasting through the 4GB of memory I had installed. The primary culprit was usually the web browser, in my case Google Chrome. I tend to have at least 10 tabs (web pages) open at all times, which is like having 10 copies of Chrome running. What I did to give the computer a breath of air every so often was to simply quit Chrome, making sure I have it set to reopen all of the tabs I had open previously. Immediately more than a GB and sometimes 2GB of memory would be liberated!
RAM is THE CHEAPEST way to upgrade the performance of your PC or Mac. The biggest cause for performance problems is lack of available physical memory when running too many applications, or is commonly the case, too many tabs in a web browser. Your computer must start using the much slower hard drive to handle the overflow of information when your RAM gets full. The best way to tell for sure you need more memory is too look at the Task Manager in Windows or the Activity Monitor in Mac OS after you've been using it for a few hours. Look at the available physical memory and if it's under 100MB, you are headed into "swap drive" territory soon. Your computer will feel like its climbing a hill covered with molasses in January (that means sllllooowww).
Once you've got the RAM maxxed out in your computer, consider swapping that archaic spinning hard disk with an SSD, or solid state drive. These high performance FLASH drives provide a HUGE performance boost over hard drives in the areas of "seeking" data. Seeking occurs when data is located at random locations within a drive, which is one main reason a spinning hard drive makes a lousy substitute for memory. RAM and FLASH memory, which is used in an SSD, can seek MUCH faster. It's still far more expensive per Gigabyte than hard drives, so I recommend getting a small one, perhaps 128GB, for your system drive, and rely on conventional hard drives for media. An SSD allows the Macbook Air to boot from off to desktop in under 20 seconds, which is remarkable.
Side note: Right now upgrading storage to a larger hard drive is not recommend due to the up to 180% increase in hard drive prices for the commonly used 1TB drives. This has had an effect on all hard drive prices as well. The cause? Massive flooding in Thailand, where many of the hard drive manufacturers source their parts. Several major industrial parks are underwater, and have been for weeks.
]]>I don't usually buy new gadgets for which I haven't read a review previously, but at $50 I couldn't resist. So I figured why not be the first to review this affordable audio interface and see how well it works?
It seems that recording professional audio into an iPhone was never part of Steve Job's master plan.
While we wait for the ultimate audio interface that connects to the iPhone via the dock connector with a digital signal, other products some to be coming along to fill the gap. The Tascam iXZ is the first one I've seen that really boils the features down to the basics in a very portable package, while still accepting a phantom powered studio condenser microphone.
The iXZ's multifunction XLR/phono combo jack will allow connection to a standard 3 pin XLR mic cable, or to a 1/4" guitar cable. It provides 48V phantom power at up to 5ma, enough for many modern mics. I metered the XLR connector and sure enough there's about 46V DC with a fresh pair of AA alkaline batteries. It's enough to power my Audio Technica AT3035 microphone with appearant ease. There's a variable input gain control dial, which isn't calibrated. It also has an 1/8" mini headphone jack for playback purposes. Sadly, it doesn't provide a "Zero latency monitoring" function to listen to the mic in your headphones while recording.
The iXZ does not come with any software, which is just fine with me. I'd much rather not waste time with some inappropriate for VO bundled application. Buy TwistedWave from the app store for $10, plug in the iZX into the headphone jack, plug in your mic, power it on, engage phantom power, hit record, set your levels, and you're recording. TwistedWave is incredibly feature reach for an iOS app, even providing the ability to process the audio through effects and FTP files. It can also deliver MP3's via their own server, a necessary workaround since Apple won't permit encoding to MP3 on an iOS device.
But does it work?
That depends on what you want to use it for. If your intention is to replace your Macbook or other laptop and audio interface with this unit for all of your work, I wouldn't go that far. Take a listen the this recorded sample using an Audio Technica AT3035 studio condenser mic and judge for yourself. CLICK TO PLAY
It's definitely quite useable for making an audition happen while traveling. And with proper noise gate settings, you might even pull off a job here and there in a pinch. Here's the first segment of the previous audio sample after processed with a noise gate in TwistedWave. CLICK TO PLAY
NOTE: Beau Weaver tested with an iPhone and DID NOT get the same results we did with the iPod Touch! The audio quality differed. In his audio test he records first with his home studio system, next with his Sennheiser 416 into the iXZ, then with the iPhone mic. LISTEN TO HIS TEST
I did test it with my T-Mobile MyTouch 4G phone, and it DOES work. However, my phone's recording quality was no where as good as the iPod Touch's. A good deal of the recording quality is thanks to the iPod itself.
To summarize, here's a Pros and Cons list.
PROS:
CONS:
Tascam iXZ and iPod Touch 4th gen
MODEL: RE-146-MC
7 FEET, 3 INCHES TALL
7 FEET, 3 INCHES WIDE
4 FEET, 8 INCHES DEEP
This is a VERY serious voice-over iso-booth, the best you can buy without hiring a studio contractor to build a custom studio. You'll need to arrange a moving van and movers to relocate it. It weighs nearly 3000 lbs and breaks down into sections.
PLEASE CALL 310-488-2935 and ask Mike McColl any questions you may have.
Asking price is $8500
It will be available starting October 18th.
