It seems my Dubler mic has a rather high noise floor. I’m not super experienced with microphones, so not sure what the expected behavior is, but my Audio Technica 3035 barely shows any input in Ableton when I’m not singing into it. The Dubler mic, by contrast, shows a lot of activity on the audio input meter. Can someone tell me what’s expected here? (Maybe my microphone/cable is bad?)
Hey JJG,
When Dubler starts up with the Dubler mic plugged int, it sets its mic volume input level automatically. This volume level is one we have selected for best performance with the Dubler app. From our end, The Dubler mic is not intended for use as a vocal mic, but as a controller for the Dubler app. There is a great variety of input levels for different mics so it’s hard to compare one mic to the other. Don’t change the Dubler mics level gain in the OS, or you might affect Dubler’s performance.
That said, you should not expect the Dubler mic to red out/peak or demonstrate high volumes at its automatically set input volume in Ableton. If it is, that might be a bug with the auto volume setter. What OS are you using? Can you send a screenshot of the input volume level that your Dubler mic is set? I want to make sure that you’re actually getting the right levels set!
Thanks!
Hey Daven,
Thanks for your help here. Sorry it took me a while to get back with you.
I don’t directly set the microphone volume input levels (that I’m aware of). When I run the Dubler mic as input to an Ableton Live track, here’s what the volume profile looks like. Is this what you’d expect for the noise floor?
Hi JJG,
Daven is away at the mo so i’m just jumping in! Are you a mac or PC user? I can see there is some noise there - this is probably a question of sensitivity and how quiet/dampened the room you’re using the mic in. The Dubler mic isn’t a vocal mic like you would find in a recording studio. A typical studio vocal mic would be a condenser (your Audio Technica 3035 is a condenser). However, the Dubler mic is dynamic. We chose this to suit our use case, our priority being to make Dubler work as well as possible - not to have the lowest signal-to-noise ratio for audio throughput. So whilst you can use the audio from the Dubler mic in other applications, we have only really concerned ourselves with using it in the Dubler software. How are you getting on with Dubler itself, is the noise causing accidental triggers?
Hey George,
Thanks for getting back with me here. I’m a PC user. I talked with someone about what might be going on here, and he said this is probably AC hum from my PC’s 60Hz power supply leaking into the mic’s input. This isn’t causing accidental triggers in Dubler, although it was triggering a low B in another audio-to-MIDI application I use.
He said this wouldn’t be common in a high-quality microphone, although maybe the Dubler mic’s application-specific purpose would make it predisposed to such behavior?
I’m curious if any other Dubler users could see whether their mic’s behave this way, too. If there’s a manufacturing defect in my microphone, it would be good to get that taken care of. Even if it’s not causing obvious mistriggers in Dubler, it may indicate underlying issues with my microphone that could be significant in other ways.
Thanks,
Jeremiah
Hi Jeremiah,
Thanks for the update. If you send a message to help@vochlea.co.uk we’d be happy to look into if there are any issues with the mic. Our main concern is if the Dubler Studio Kit is working well. So if you’re finding adverse behaviour when using it with other applications then we can’t really trouble shoot that, but we’d be happy to troubleshoot any issues found when using the Dubler mic with Dubler. All the best,
George
Okay, I just e-mailed support.
If any other users would care to share their mic’s behavior (so we can see what’s normal here), that would be great! 