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• Tips on Acoustics for Your Home Studio
• Frequently Asked Questions from Voice Talent
• Tips on ISDN, 2 3
• Tips on Wiring Your Home Studio, 2 3 4
• Tips on Selecting and Using a Microphone

Which ever setup is right for you, try to keep it simple.

• Lots of voice talent use mixers for either production mixing or monitor mixing and most mixers have mic preamps built in. The temptation to use the internal mic pre should be avoided unless you have a good working knowledge of signal flow. It's best to purchase an outboard mic preamp and use it as an upstream device.
• Voice talent that use their equipment for nothing but ISDN sessions need a less complicated setup. Keep the audio path short and direct. Have a Y cable made to send the output of your mic preamp to two places: the codec input and ultimately to your headphones. (Some mic preamps have dual outputs. If you have one like this, you don't need the Y cable.) Setups like this will never have issues with slap-back caused by mixing ProComm's talk-back into your signal back to us. Also, setups like this tend to have less technical issues and gain stage problems at session time.
• Some voice talent do their own production and need more elaborate control rooms. If you're one of these people, a room wired around a patch bay is best. The more equipment your signal has to travel through the more noise and coloration it's subjected to. Use of a patch bay as a central hub for interconnection offers more flexibility and the ideal set up for direct routing of your audio signal. Have all equipment inputs and outputs terminate on the patch bay including your mixer line inputs and buses. (Direct wire your mixer's mic inputs to a snake going to your studio.) Then, when in session, patch your mic preamp to the codec input to feed ProComm and to a mixer input for your headphones. Patch the codec output to the mixer too so you can hear ProComm talk-back. When you need to do your own production, repatch.
• When it comes to EQ and compression, ProComm needs an unadulterated version of your voice. Even though compression and EQ can enhance your voice and make it sound super cool, remember we might have to match that voice to one we recorded two years ago. The best signal you can send is a completely unaffected one. Bypass your EQ and compression if it's part of your mic preamp. If your compression and EQ are separate boxes, you shouldn't have them in the audio chain to start with. Remember, direct and simple.