Gear

Like we said in a blog post , video is very difficult and expensive to produce which is why we redoubled our efforts into bringing you a great audio podcast instead. With that said for those of you that are curious about the gear that we use to bring you the show every week there is your behind the scenes view

This is where it all starts! This is the Berhringer C-1 Condenser microphone. Some podcasters will tell you that you need a Heil PR-40 but that bad boy costs about $325 and for a podcast that doesn’t get any revenue that’s a lot of money! However it is a huge Improvement over what we started with.

When we did the original episode, our only video episode, we were using a pair of these babies,the UpRight JT-988 they are decent but again not high end stuff.

 

Now this thing was what I used in episode 5, which is why my audio was crappy but the batteries in the JT-988 had died and in a pinch I grabbed this.

This is the mixer, the Alesis Multimix 4 USB we started off using when we were physically in the same location. Very simple but has no Aux sends which meant we couldn’t use it when we decided to use skype.

Now this is the baby that replaced the Alesis mixer, the Behringer Xynix X1204 USB, has 8 channels, but more importantly it has 1 Aux send, and even some built in effects processing, This is the bad boy that we will be using for the foreseeable future.

This final bit of hardware is a mini rack that contains a pair of compressor/limiter/ gates, however we use these for the gate functionality to try to keep the background noises down to a minimum and a standard consumer graphic Eq.

We also record directly off the main mix to this little digital recorder, it’s a bit of overkill however being an IT Professional I try to have some redundancy when possible, and this little gem will record the show even in the event that Audition crashes and we lose the file.

Now for the software!

Everything from the mixer goes over USB to the main computer which records it directly to disk as a .WAV file before I edit it.

All of our audio clips and music is queued up in this little gem, when then send it back to the main mix and then again back to san broadcaster to encode it for our live stream
And finally we spit everything back up to the web server using Icecast.