Soundcards for Radio Stations
26 Apr 2008 | No Comments | posted by James M | in Industry Insider
A good quality soundcard is absolutely vital if you are real serious about having a high quality sounding stream. Especially if you are inputting music from an external source (eg. microphone, cd players, ipod/mp3 players, mini disc) via a mixing desk. Chances are, the standard soundcard that comes with your computer won’t be the best quality and you may get interference in your broadcasts or recordings.
We use the M-Audio Delta 44 at our office for our ‘radio pc’ where we do occasionally broadcast from live, plus do quite a bit of production work with. We have got 2 mono and 1 stereo outputs coming from this going into the mixing desk and then being fed back in stereo to the soundcard.
Looks like this:
The great thing about the M-Audio Delta 44 soundcard we use is that it produces excellent results. We’d highly recommend it to anyone!
There are of course other professional soundcards you can pick up and which can be installed into nearly all desktop PC’s.
Check out the following links for some great soundcards:
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Delta44-main.html
http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.family&ID=recording
Good quality radio broadcasting needs a decent condenser microphone!
7 Jan 2008 | No Comments | posted by James M | in Industry Insider
If you’re serious about setting up a radio / voiceover studio – or indeed doing any kind of audio voice recording, get a good quality condenser microphone and you will be well on your way to producing really top notch results.
A condenser microphone is a familiar site in radio/recording studios and in lay mans terms, you’ll notice that they are a lot bigger and usually hung from an arm, as opposed to microphones you’ve probably seen people singing/presenting on stage using.
If you want to know more about the technical side of things (although its not entirely relevant to what i’m saying), check out
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condenser_microphone#Condenser.2C_capacitor_or_electrostatic_microphones
You can spend anywhere between £50 and £5000 (or more!) on a condenser mic. If you are running a home studio, i’d say something around the £80 -£150 mark would be ideal.
Behringer do some good condenser microphones, which are on a ‘low end professional’ budget (Eg. you can pick up a decent Behringer mic for around £100 – some on a similar level are £300 – 400).
Check out some of the condenser mics on:
http://www.behringer.com/02_products/group_index.cfm?mid=2&ID=500&lang=eng#LARGE%20DIAPHRAGM%20CONDENSER%20MICROPHONES
Other very well known makes you might want to look at include…
Audio-Technia: http://www.audio-technica.com/
Neumann: http://www.neumannusa.com/
Rode: http://www.rodemic.com/
AKG: http://www.akg.com/
Samson: http://www.samsontech.com/