Why is my AKG Perception 220 recording microphone recording so quietly?

Question

Why is my AKG Perception 220 recording microphone recording so quietly?

Answer 1

Akg Perception 220

Answer 2

This one's a tricky one. There are a number of factors that could be contributing to the noise/distortion you're getting. The noise is may be coming from the sound reverberating and bouncing back and forth in the room. It may be very subtle to your ears, but microphones will pick up a lot more detail. One way to cut down on the noise in your room is to record the voiceover in a corner of the room, and place a large pillow behind the mic, between the mic and the corner of the wall. The idea is to let the pillow absorb your voice so it doesn't reflect to the other walls and back into the mic. if you have a thick blanket you can use, hang it over something tall behind you so it absorbs any extra noise. I'm sure it'll look pretty sill, but it may cut down on this source of noise. Another source of noise can come from not getting a strong enough signal from your mixer, hopefully the next part will fix it either way. Distortion is most likely due to the volume levels you're recording at or rendering from in garageband. as an easy point of reference, keep the volume levels on the mixer at the middle, to 3/4 of the full volume. Make sure gain, if the mixer has it, is at zero or unity (infinity symbol). Keep the eq's at zero (if you want, you can turn the high freq EQ up a bit, and the low EQ down a little, not a lot, very subtle) Now when you see the signal in garageband, and you're practicing the voiceover, the levels should be bouncing up and down between half to almost full volume, it shouldn't be hitting the red (also called clipping). If it is clipping, bring down the volume on the mixer and practice keeping your voice volume even so you get enough volume but it doesn't clip. This process should be a good guideline to get the cleanest signal possible into garageband. Now in garageband, you make the same adjustments to make sure you're not clipping in the mixer. After you record the voiceover, using a compressor will help even out the level as well. Whoa.. sorry if that was too verbose. Hope that helps.

Answer 3

The mic itself is probably fine - mics rarely have problems and usually last for many years. My guess would be that the Lexicon may have a problem or maybe the soltware. You might try reloading the Lexicon software or maybe downloading Audacity and try that.



http://audacity.sourceforge.net/