Monthly Archives: October 2007

In the audio world, there are a lot of places where you can lose money. You can underbid contracts, run out of time thereby inducing costly make-up procedures or just have instruments/computer equipment/random electronics break on you when you least expect it. However, the best place that you have control over your money is when you originally invest it in the gear you use everyday. There are a few areas here that have been written about endlessly. One of those is cables. Another, is microphones.

When I first started to aim at going “pro”, I read up on microphones and decided that my little SM58 probably would not cut it for everything and so I went shopping for a bargain condenser mic that could be used for many different applications.

It wasn’t long before I was shocked at how large of a price range there is in the condensor microphone business. At the low-end, you can get buy for somewhere around $75, or cheaper used and at the high, end, well, $3,000 and up!

As I was just getting started I wanted to find something clean that had a nice deep sound to it that worked well on a variety of material, including spoken voice. I opted for the RODE NT1 condenser. It is very basic, but performs well! I was happy with my purchase. However, when a recent VO gig came up, I decided to investigate again, to see what a higher costing mic might afford me.

Fortunately for me, the local public radio station, KMST, and the friendly folks there including John Francis and Chuck Knapp, had purchased a pair of KSM 44′s for field recording and agreed to loan me one, along with a small tree stand, for the purposes of this shootout.

What I then did was mount the mics right next to each other, and spoke some rather uninspired dialog inbetween them. I recorded them both into the basic preamps of my MOTU 828MkII audio interface, and recorded them at 24-bit/44.1Khz. All of this was recorded in my isobooth. The picture you in this post illustrates the setup used.

Now, there are a few disclaimers I need to make during this test. This was not performed with world-class, ultra-precision hardware and tuned within .05 dB gain or anything ridiculous such as this. For this test, I was more interested in the bottom line: when doing voice overs, that are often compressed down to 128 kbps MP3 (or worse!), will there be a noticeable difference in the quality of the VO when using the KSM 44. There are many, many more tests that COULD have been done for instruments, field work, sound design, etc. But they were not. The critic reviews have shown that the KSM 44 is a fantastic microphone offering not only huge value, but superior performance. Street price on a KSM 44 is currently around $800 with the Rode NT1 being about $200. (more…)

All of you probably saw Jon Frisby’s (Mr. Joy, Inc.) post-mortem regarding his new game When Orcs Attack!

If not, you can read about it here:
garagegames.com/blogs/48969/13597

Before reading, I would highly suggest you download and play the demo as well — as you will get much more out of this if you understand what I’m referring to! Download it here:

mrjoy.com/games/6

As the audio designer for the game, there were several interesting things that happened during the development for this game that I thought others might find interesting and perhaps applicable to their current situations. For Torque users, however, your mileage may vary as WoA was developed on the Unity3D platform, so some of these “solutions” that we came up with may or may not exist for you and some additional ones may be available as well! In case you are wondering, I also did the two tracks of music in the game, but most of my post-mortem will be focusing on the sound design elements of the game.

What went right

1) (Pretty) Clear scope In all sound design projects for games that I work on, this can be a big issue. Knowing exactly WHEN to incorporate the sound designer at a stage where the scope is pretty well nailed down is key. Most sound designers are working on “per sound effect” price point as opposed to a “retainer format” (unless you are very rich and can offer health and dental plans…), so for the sound designer to produce extra sounds that you won’t actually use can become quite costly. This project, however, was well scoped and I was shown the project pretty late in development, so most of the major features were there and could be seen — so any additional sounds were figured out pretty quickly.

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