Audacity, Audio Tech 2020 USB mic, and monitoring problems

Lee Kanne · **Voice Talent** Joined: 20 Dec 2005 Posts: 129

I am trying to help a brethren voiceover artiste get up and running with a home rig, and I've had a dickens of a time with some headphone monitoring/latency isssues

they have an Audio Technica 2020 usb mic and a Dell, with SB Live 16 stock soundcard....

they can record fine, no problems....

the headphone output from the sound card contains a substantial delay....I have
played with all the latency correction and buffer settings to no avail....you can do this in the new version of Audacity

they have software playthrough checked, and I'm sure that's why I have latency in the playback...

If they uncheck it and just use hardware playthrough,they get no signal at all out of my headphones..

is the answer an external mixer? or is there a low latency asio drive r for the sb live 16?

Chris Clementson · **Voice Seeker** Joined: 14 Jan 2008 Posts: 216

Lee -

You could look into http://www.asio4all.com.

Lee Kanne · **Voice Talent** Joined: 20 Dec 2005 Posts: 129

thanks Chris..

I didn't know there was an ASIO driver that would work with a SB Live Card...

nice catch

Chris Clementson · **Voice Seeker** Joined: 14 Jan 2008 Posts: 216

To be honest, I tried installing ASIO4all back in December and it introduced all sorts of pops and clicks into my recordings. I'm not trying to foul up your audio, but I'm hoping he has rectified the problems between then and the release of the current version. Here's hoping you have better luck with this version than I had in December.

Lee Kanne · **Voice Talent** Joined: 20 Dec 2005 Posts: 129

wouldn't be a lot easier to go this route?

http://www.musiciansfriend.com/product/Behringer-Eurorack-UB502-5Channel-Compact-Mixer?sku=631239

Chris Clementson · **Voice Seeker** Joined: 14 Jan 2008 Posts: 216

He's got an AT2020 USB mic. That's not going to work with a conventional mixer. It would work if it were a conventional (non-USB) mic.

Lee Kanne · **Voice Talent** Joined: 20 Dec 2005 Posts: 129

It will work

You route the output in Audacity to the onboard soundcard, then take the line outputs off the soundcard into the mixer, then take a headphone output off the mixer, thus bypassing any kind of software playthrough....

Chris Clementson · **Voice Seeker** Joined: 14 Jan 2008 Posts: 216

Lee Kanne · **Voice Talent** Joined: 20 Dec 2005 Posts: 129

As I turns out, the mixer or the headphone amp don't work....

Doesn't matter if you go line out or headphone out of the soundcard, you're still faced with a massive amount of latency.....

back to the drawing board

Chris Clementson · **Voice Seeker** Joined: 14 Jan 2008 Posts: 216

Analog mic and analog mixer/preamp?

Lee Kanne · **Voice Talent** Joined: 20 Dec 2005 Posts: 129

one of the beauties of a tascam 4 track cassette portastudio....latency free monitoring and recording in one box

there's gotta be somebody in the universe that has gotten one of these USB mic thingies to work the right way...

George Whittam · **Voice Seeker** Joined: 26 Oct 2007 Posts: 21

That is the primary issue with USB microphones that don't have built in headphone monitoring. You will ALWAYS get latency when listening through headphones connected to a secondary audio device. MXL is releasing a 008 mic with built in monitoring that works great, and M-Audio just released on for $99 http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/SessionMusicProducer-main.html
SE makes one, as well, but it is close to $400.

Lee Kanne · **Voice Talent** Joined: 20 Dec 2005 Posts: 129

thanks man,

you confirmed my suspicions

that M-audio piece looks like a winner!

Steve Cotsalas · **Voice Talent** Joined: 10 May 2007 Posts: 109

Take a look at the Rode Podcaster mic..not cheap, about $230, and
built like a tank compared to a lot of mics.What's relevant to this discussion is that it has a headphone jack built right in to the mic. Works great.Easy to use, easily recognized by the cpu.