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Dialing in the right sound of your microphone processor

Everyone’s first instinct when they get a new processor installed is to set the new one up exactly like the old one. We know how our voice is supposed to sound, and if we just turn the new knobs the same as the old ones, it’s going to come out the same, right?

Not necessarily.

Especially if you’re coming to a digital processor from an analog one, what’s happening “under the hood” can be different. The upside of replacing an aging analog processor with a digital one (besides getting rid of a bunch of dried out capacitors) is now you’re working with a lower noise floor, so there’s no hiss at high gain settings.

On the other hand, the latency in an analog processor is measured in microseconds and in the digital world it’s milliseconds. This can have an impact on how you sound in your headphones. Keep in mind, too, that room acoustics will influence the sound more than either the microphone or the processor, so if you are moving into a new studio, processing alone isn’t going to solve a room that’s too “live.”

When a customer reports that a mic processor sounds “anemic” it usually means one or more of the following:

  • Input gain too low, or compressor threshold too high, causing the compressor to not do much work
  • Compressor ratio too low compared to the processor it’s being compared to
  • Settings from the old processor are being dialed into the new one, but the processors are radically different in design so they can’t sound identical

Factory presets are intended to quickly set what can be an intimidating number of controls into a more normal state. But they are very basic starting points, and will almost always need some kind of adjustment of input gain, EQ, and such to match the room, microphone, and voice. With microphones like the SM-7 or RE-20, which put out a fairly low level, you will almost always need to increase the input gain from the factory preset to get proper levels compared to a condenser. Use the preset as a starting point, and find your sweet spot from there.