Topic: My JB3 recording sounds really low, can barely hear it...

[dhora]

I finally got a chance to test out my mics/jb3 in the field. The levels were fine.  I ended up running my jb3 at +2db and had pretty good levels.  Had to normalize a little in post, but not nearly as much as I did when I was trying to test my rig at home.

[Howid]

I taped about 2 hours, still have to pull it to my computer and mess with it with Sound Forge. From my headphones, the sound is pretty low (at +12 DB!) but I think when I use Sound Forge to normalize, I may be suprised.

[Howid]

ok, I took down the test show from my JB3 and made a couple wav smaplers for the experts to hear. Any help or suggestions would be great.

This was recorded at a local bar/ restaurant about 10-12 feet from the band right in the middle. I used a camcorder case (used to transport my jb3) as a mic stand on the table we sat at. The mics were about 6 inches apart and turned to the left and to the right (they sat like this  \  /  ).

I used the Giant Squid Cardioids and my JB3 with the gain turned up to +12dB like was suggested. These two samples are one raw and one that I normalized in Sound Forge 7.

Here are the links... (they were too big to attach to the board, so I uploaded them to my server).

http://www.bdlab.com/sampler_12db_raw.wav

http://www.bdlab.com/sampler_12db_normalized.wav

Any feedback would be great.

Thanks for helping me get this far!

[dklein]

What kind of feedback are you after?  The immediate thing that jumps out is the lack of bottom end.  Things really drop off below ~150 Hz.  This is probably just the sound of the cardiod capsules in use.  Giant Squid says the specs are +/- 4dB from 100Hz - 12k.  You might want to do some eq'g to get that sounding reasonable.  To be honest, I wouldn't really consider that a 'music recording' capsule. 

As far as using a preamp goes, you had about 9 dB of room on the raw file with the JB3 at +12 dB so you'd do fine with a preamp  providing ~20dB of gain.  But if you're going to spend some money making things sound better those mics should probably go first.