SL16.4.2 sound crackled in the recording

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 15/07/2011 23:49:14

last sunday did a live recording of a 100+ piece youth choir.

used soundcraft 32ch mixer as a a main board, and sl 16.4.2 as a soundcard.

live everything sounded ok. but in the recording for one songs, some crackling noise got recorded from the presonus mixer.

(recording signal chain mics/lines>soundcraft>direct outs>sl16.4.2>fw cable>mac book pro>capture)

i attached a recording. the crackling can be heard at 00:22 - 00:40.

That's a great recording. Maybe I enjoyed the music too much, but I didn't hear any crackling. I went back and listened again, on a better system, and heard a few things that sounded like it might have been a delay on a snare drum in the time frame that you pointed out, but I noticed them on the first listen and didn't think it was a technical problem.

Maybe I'm just not as fussy as you are, or it's something that I have to put on headphones in order to hear. Is it really that obvious?

Thanks Mike,
maybe it wasn't StudioLive at all, but a grounding problem or something or maybe firewire cable or jack (even though i use a good cable).
on my KRK VXT6s it's most obvious, and since i know the part where it's crackling every time i listen thru that part

first of all: WOW! Great recording.
I only heard a "strange" drum in your specified part, seems some interference between two mics.
Can you seperate your tracks? Or do you think, your "crackling" is on all channels? Eventually you can correct your crackling by using a gate or edit through studio one?

Regards,
Carsten

the crackling noise is very quite and at extreme left and right.

I recorded this multi-channelly in capture, than imported into cubase, compressed, eq'd and panned the choir mics a bit (8 crown hanging mics).

I think the drums are like that in the backing track, or maybe not,
here I uploaded the backing track that was used during that performance, have a listen if it's the same.

(I imported the backing track into cubase later, because i didn't have enough channels during live performance to record. maybe i need to get SL24.4.2

)

Great recording, as the others here have already said. I sure can't hear anything wrong during the time frame you mentioned. Great work!

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 17/07/2011 13:27:29

ts-12 wrote:
I think the drums are like that in the backing track, or maybe not,
here I uploaded the backing track that was used during that performance, have a listen if it's the same.

(I imported the backing track into cubase later, because i didn't have enough channels during live performance to record. maybe i need to get SL24.4.2 )

Oooh! Good sounding backing track. That's cheating!

That sort of "clack" that I heard in the full choir recording is present in the backing track right in the time frame that you point out. It almost sounds like a wood block that's a little out of phase between channels, but when I zoomed in to see if they were out of alignment on a single hit, they were right on, The MP3 compression might be doing some of that.

Was the choir hearing the backing track through speakers, or were they all on headphones? Don't laugh - I've known sessions where the engineer cobbled up a whole bunch of headphone distribution boxes and told everyone in the choir to bring their own headphones. If they were listening to speakers, it's possible that there was enough of the backing track leaking into the choir mics that you were getting some phase shifts when you mixed them. Listen to the choir mics individually or in combinations of two.

Another thing that you might be able to determine by listening to the choir tracks is if this crackle is something in the playback system for the backing track. It wouldn't be on the file that you uploaded here, but if it came through the speakers that the choir (and their mics) was listening to, it would be recorded.

But I'm not sure, still, if I'm talking about the same thing that you're hearing. I didn't hear a crackle that was isolated to an extreme right or left position.

I heard the smallest crackle at 25.5 seconds on good headphones up loud. - I had to listen 10 times to hear it and I was listening for it, so whatever it is its tiny and I really do not think anyone would notice it unless you pointed it out!

could not hear anything on my cheap headphones or middle range 5.1 system

its not firewire - sounds like the noise you get a a dirty connection when you wiggle the plug - but its not even as loud as that

GL pinpointing it

Thank You all.
there were no headphones, there was alotta leakage from the speakers into choir mics because choir directors wanted it very loud in the monitors, they didn't like my idea of having just music in the monitors, but oh well..

later they want to do more of studio type recording, so I think it we will use headphones

If you want to keep dogging this, try to find the crackle on any, or all of the choir tracks. If it's on all of them, it probably came from the playback of the backing track. If it's just on one or a couple of them, it might be one of digital glitches that we can all expect at some time even though they should never be there.

I have had a crackle in my recordings early on. I found out that I had to increase my sample rate to 1024. After that, I didn't have any noise in my recordings. That was with an older computer with a pentium processor.

OT but oh well...

Dale!!!! Where you been? Haven't seen anything from you in a looong while.

Dale Christenson wrote:I have had a crackle in my recordings early on. I found out that I had to increase my sample rate to 1024.

FYI, 1024 is the ASIO buffer size, not sample rate.