Audio Recording

This is one of the common questions in home recording even today. Before answering directly this question, you need to know some important history on how digital recording process evolved over time. Back in the very old days (when USB and Firewire audio interface are not yet common in the market), it is often very difficult to get a good recording signal without a mixer. It is because the first type of audio interface used is a PCI sound card which does not have the sufficient electronic circuitry to get clean recorded signal.

Most PCI sound cards when used for professional music production have some serious limitations which are as follows:

a.) The recorded signal is often weak and noisy because there is no quality microphone pre-amp in any PCI sound cards.

b.) Most sound cards available during that time accept at most two channel recording (stereo) at the same time. If you are tracking a band which requires more than two channels, it is impossible to do that with a PCI sound card alone.

c.) The impedance mismatch between the sound card line input and musical instruments output are severe, and you will notice a weak and noisy signal as a result.

Without a mixer, the most primitive connections of musical instrument to your computer PCI soundcard are as follows:

Musical Instrument — PCI Soundcard – Computer (DAW)

In terms of signal path and recording, you can only record one instrument at a time because of input and sound card limitations:

Home Studio Mixer is the immediate answer before

Plague with so many recording quality issues, the problems are solved by using a home studio mixer. The required mixer may not need to be very big or expensive. Even a small Behringer Xenyx 502 would work. Thus it is connected as follows:

Musical Instrument — Home Studio Mixer – PCI Soundcard – Computer (DAW)

Now the musical instruments (guitars, microphones, etc) are connected first to a small mixer before connecting to the PCI soundcard inputs. The mixer has a built in preamp that boost the microphone levels to line level outputs. With this setup, it finally solves the recording signal quality issues associated with the original PCI soundcard recording before.
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If Shure SM58 is a legendary dynamic microphone, it is OK to use them for recording vocals in my home studio?

The immediate answer is YES. But why you can use them deserves an entire blog post. There is more to learn than by simply buying SM58 and call it a perfect vocal recording solution. First it is important to know its frequency response characteristics. See below:

Photo credits: Shure.com

This is the behavior of SM58:

1.) It is linearly/flat somewhere around 110Hz to 2500Hz. This implies that if the original vocals lie within this frequency range, it is neither boosted nor cut by the microphone behavior. The microphone does not add any EQ coloration at this frequency range.

2.) But if the vocal frequency is somewhat below 110Hz, the vocals frequency would be roll off (cut or attenuated) even if there is substantial bass presence in the vocals.

3.) Now for frequencies above 2500Hz until 10,000Hz, SM58 would gradually add a boost as shown in the frequency response peaking at +5dB somewhere between 5000Hz and 10,000Hz.

4.) It adds a very slight boost above 10,000Hz but not significant above 15,000Hz.

What does SM58 Frequency Response Implies in terms of Recording?

Since SM58 is a perfect vocal microphone for live performance, the frequency response as well confirms it can be a great microphone for recording vocals in your home studio in such a way that it absolutely needs less processing in the mix resulting in a more natural vocal recording. The following are the reasons why:
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Saffire Pro 40 is one of the best audio interfaces around $500. It can accept 8 preamp inputs and provide around 20 inputs/20 outputs total. It is capable of recording up to 24-bit/96KHz resolution. It is using Firewire as a connection from the hardware to your PC.

This post would list down the potential issues and possible solutions in using Saffire Pro 40. Knowing this in advance, you will learn how to avoid the potential problems associated with using this audio interface.

I am using this audio interface for around 2 months already and all problems are not related to the hardware itself but more on the PC hardware and software configuration.

Potential Problem: Audio Latency and DropOut

I have once an old PC which is using the following specifications:

1.) ASUS P4P800-X
2.) Windows XP OS
3.) Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz
4.) 2GB RAM
5.) Two hard drives at 160GB each
6.) Firewire connected using a very cheap Firewire PCI card

The Windows XP OS has been installed since 2006 and it has never been reinstalled and repaired. Also the hard drives are kind of faulty and I received some check disk errors during booting.

Finally I went to install Saffire Pro 40 drivers and attached the hardware to my PC, so what’s the result? Audio drop out and latency.

At first, I am worried it can be related to the hardware and driver. So I went to reinstall the driver by going to the Focusrite website. But the problem is still not resolved.

Occasionally it went well, but when I play some MP3 files via Windows Media player for a long time, the audio playback tends to drop out randomly.

To add to the problem, my hard drive finally crashed on the fifth day and I suspect not only hard drive problem but a motherboard problem as well (its been running since 2006) because the problem persist even removing the faulty drive.

So I get a new motherboard, CPU, RAM, hard drive and went to re-install Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 on Windows XP again. This finally resolves the issue.

Until now, I do not encounter even a single drop out in the playback and recording. It now works perfectly.

LESSON: If your computer has some motherboard, hard drive and other related hardware/software issues, it can cause audio drop out in your audio interface. So you need to fix that one.
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