[Asterisk-Users] Digium TheVoice recordings' sound terrible

[Greg Boehnlein]

On Sun, 24 Oct 2004, Joe Greco wrote:

> > I know she works at Digium but they probably go down the street to a real
> > sound stage to do the recordings via 3rd party.
> > 
> > A sound stage is a facility used to create and process professional
> > recordings.  They can be used by anyone employed by an company.
> 
> http://www.theivrvoice.com/
> 
> would seem to imply otherwise.  I'd be a bit surprised if any company had
> enough work to keep her employed full-time, so the "works at Digium" line
> sounds a bit fishy to me.

Not that it matters, but I met Allison at Astricon and talked with her 
about her recording setup. All she does is voice over work. That is it. 
That is her job. All day long.

Now, that being said, I have a background in Audio production. Allison has 
a professional quality condensor mic that cost roughly $1,500 (US 
Dollars). She ties that into a variety of PC based audio recording and 
mixdown tools and goes through a fairly detailed mix-down process for all 
recordings. I'm pretty sure she has external A/D converters as 
well. (Analog to Digital) I.E. not your average $2 sound card!.

Allison has done quite a bit of Voice work for myself and the projects 
that I've worked on, and her product has always been top quality. I have 
never received Audio files, either directly from her, or via 
TheVoice.Digium.Com that are overmodulated or clipped.

I have loaded her stuff into various programs (SoundForge, Pro-Tools) and 
I notice that her earlier clips (I.E. the * prompts) are not quite as 
"hot" as the newer stuff she has done. By "hot" I mean that the "volume" 
of the clip is a db or so lower. A quality sound engineer will maximize 
the volume without clipping ("normalize") to provide the highest quality 
signal with the least noise. Hence, the newer stuff that I've looked at 
has a lower Signal to Noise ratio (good) and a higher overall volume (also 
good).

You can very easily normalize all of your GSM files by following the 
directions on http://voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+sound+files

BTW: I'm also pretty sure that Allison is contracted by Digium, and not 
neccessarily employed. She's Canadian...

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