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Showing posts from August, 2010

The Difference a Preamp Makes

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Or to put it another way: Making a free internal sound card record like a $150 sound card. This blog post is about achieving good audio recording as cheaply as possible, so I'm going to kick it off with an audio file so you can actually hear the difference that I'm talking about. Here's the story. I don't use a headset to talk to people on the computer; those things are uncomfortable and the audio quality sucks. For the longest time I used a dynamic mic (which was the Shure PG58 ), attached to a tripod stand, and the mic plugs into my Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum, which has a 1/4 TRS jack socket and a built-in preamp which did a great job at recording my voice (compared to the headset). Over the many years I've used it to record video tutorials and recently I've been using that microphone constantly on Skype writing for Hackberry Hollow . A few weeks ago I bought a new computer. The computer that I've been using (the one that was bought