I seriously question YOUR ears. My company has used all kinds of equipment, excepy Meyer. Sorry, Behringer can’t stand up to Mackie. In fact, we’ve gone exclusively over to Mackie. Best sound, best bang for buck. Our clients have been more than satisified. Listen harder.

Mackie and Behringer both produce low-quality, disposable gear. The only difference is that the Behringer gear is a lot cheaper.

Don’t believe the hype….

A friend of mine just received one from his wife (lucky bastard), and he’s been using it for his trumpet recordings — sounds very warm but not artificially so.

Micing trumpets really comes down to personal taste — depends if you want that dark studio sound favored by people like Woody Shaw, John Swana, and Terence Blanchard, or a more brilliant Lee Morgan kind of thing. And even then, it comes down to mic placement and how you play into the mic (not to mention the fact that some horns record well and some don’t).

-mk

Much has been written about gear snobbery in Pro Audio land, and I’m going to write some more. 20 years ago - not that long ago - the “pro audio” types had home studios with AKAI open reel decks, only passed around demos on Type IV Metal cassettes, and recorded with early-80s Roland synths. In their opinion, this equipment sounded good - and they did indeed do the job. But all of those things were, by 2007 standards, noisy as hell.

Zap to 2007. The very average Sigmatel codec in a typical Dell laptop, or an SB Audigy, sounds a bazillion times better (cleaner, better dynamics and frequency response) than any of the analog recorders the typical home studio people had 25 years ago.

One of those $60 cheapie large diaphragm mics (like a Marshall MXL 990) put through a Bery 802 and recorded with a sub-$100 card - say, an Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1 2in 8out card - will return a far far cleaner and by any measure better result than what was being used in the best home studios of 1984 with equipment in the tens of thousands of dollars.

I have no doubt that this fact is as threatening to those who have spent truckfuls of money on equipment - and the people who sell it - as it is liberating to those of us who want to spend as little as necessary to get results satisfactory to us.

RODE mics (Australian) are also very good and cheap

These mics wouldn’t be able to compete with the big name mics but they are very affordable for those on a budget and mean you don’t have to compromise much on the sound.

A couple of half-decent and well-placed (use your ears!) boundary mics are great for grabbing the general room sound for live recordings - mix that with some ’spot’ mics on the instruments and you are on to a winner…

The acoustic panels mentioned in the article are only good for stopping early reflections an flutter echo - they would have no effect on bass. The only way to stop bass is with volume - there are DIY options for this sort of thing though - corner killers, reactive panels, even quadratic residue diffusers if you are up to a bit of math and woodwork!

That’s bullshit. The early beatles stuff was done on equipment that was essentially hand-made and of high quality.

To the other critics of the setup: This article is perfectly targeted for me; someone who has a little more than no money to spend on equipment, but is doing it for my own and my friends’ fun, and will never go into the recording business. I know perfection when I hear it, and when the day comes that I need it I’ll get access to the equipment (and more important, the people) I need to make it happen, but for now my budget it the most important variable in the equation. So what would be most helpful as a follow-up is if you make criticisms or alternate recommendations *within the context of the price point.*

We all know Pro Tools is more capable than Audigy, and maybe you think it’s an absolute must. So what about the rest of the setup would you change to make it affordable?

It would be nice, as some sites do for homebuilt PCs, to see people’s recommended setups at various price points — the $500 budget system, $1,000, $2,500, etc.

Thanks again Mike.

As for everyone crying that things are too cheap to do anything serious, remember this. The Beatles recorded their first 3 albums LIVE OFF THE FLOOR with stuff that sounds “cheaper” than anything listed here.

If you can’t get the job done with affordable gear, you can’t get it done, period. The author is not talking about trying to record the next gramym winning album here, he’s talking about making indie music on a budget, so get off your high horses all you whiners and in the words of Frank Zappa “go play with your telefunken U47″

Definitely go with Sennheiser’s HD-280 Pro headphones and pirate Cubase or Nuendo instead of M-Audio Session.

The first article on very cheap home studio is nothing but a waste of money.

But I do think the overall set up in the article is reasonable enough to allow people who’ve never recorded to at least get their feet wet. And it’s a good entry into discussion and exploration.

There are a few inaccuracies in the article:

- Calling Behringer preamps “high quality” is not quite right. They’re “cheap” preamps, and they sound like it.

- Referring to the Auralex panels that would “dampen the sound in your recording room so the bass doesn’t turn to mud.” The panels will have some effect on early reflections in the mid range and high end, but will have no effect at all on the low end and bass frequenices.

- “people who want a high-quality low-budget setup”. The set up listed is not going to give anyone “high quality” results. It’s a “low quality” set and the results are going to be “lo-fi”.

- With that set up you do not need the mixer. The only reason to get the mixer is for the mic preamps and DI. A better option would be to just get an inexpensive but decent external mic preamp/DI. A few good options would be the $120 Studio Projects VTB-1 if one channel is enough. Or the $150 M-Audio DMP3 for a two-channel preamp/DI.

- As far as gain, you’re better to run peaks from -12dB to -6dB. Up to the red is not necessary, and can even make you run out of headroom. Also better to peak lower and run preamps lower. - 6dB is a generally accepted good top peak level in digital recording.

Something that’s not covered in the article where people are going to run into problems is need for some kind of pop filter in front of the microphone to keep sounds like “P’s” from clipping the meters and just generally sounding nasty. For starters, even pantyhose stretched over a coat hanger will work. Or just Google “pop filter” or “DIY pop filter” for more info.

For the next part, why not show how you can use plugins to improve your audacity recordings. There’s tons of free stuff out there, so it’ll be really cool to see what you’re using.

To go from analog (your mixer) to digital (your computer) requires some key components that influence the quality of your recording as much (if not more) than your mic or your gear.

If you really want to track it all to a computer, you’re probably better off spending the cash on a digital mixer or FireWire interface that will convert your analog signals to high quality 24-bit/48 kHz, and then use your computer to mix.

Of course, if you have my problem, it doesn’t matter how much you spend if what’s going into all of this sounds like crap anyway :)

It seems to me that most of the criticisms that others have made are unfair, and are often based on self-flattery and boastfulness about their own budgets and preferences.

Well, you are all correct about garbage in - garbage out, but the author is obviously trying to make some suggestions for those who don’t have a Cadillac budget or who may need a good, but maybe not the absolutely best sounding solution.

So instead of just telling us all what’s better, why don’t you also tell us what it costs? Better yet, why don’t you list a complete “package” for everyone that is in the same price range as the author’s?