Bad Vocals After Switching from eMac to MacBook

[BHobby]

I am a professional voice over guy. Occasionally I will record stuff for projects friends are working on and in order to do this I got about the most basic set-up imaginable. M-Audio mbox and a Shure SM58. I realize I'm not blowing any minds with that. Professionally I record in amazing studios with the best equipment, but this set-up suits my needs fine.

I used to record in garageband on an old eMac and the sound quality was fine for my purposes. When I switched this fall to one of the new macbooks, the sound changed dramatically. Suddenly my voice sounds tinnier and slightly distant. I lost all the upfront, standing right beside you feel that I was getting with the old set-up. All the equipment and settings have been the same. The only difference was switching computers and changing to a much newer version of garageband. Is the newer version better somehow? With better drivers or something, so my weak equipment is showing its true colors? I really have no clue what's going on.

Ideas?

 

[barkmonster]

I use an MBox2 at home. It's fairly similar and I have a few suggestions:-

It might be that garageband is seeing it as 16bit audio device, not 24 bit like it is. That makes a lot difference to sound quality because there's only 65536 possible levels of audio with 16 bit vs over 16.7 Million with 24 bit.

Have you tried using it with Pro Tools LE that comes with the device?

Go to www.digidesign.com and check for drivers. It's also likely that the drivers for your eMac are for a G4 not an intel Mac like your Macbook and OS X is emulating them in Rosetta and failing miserably.

Try it with Pro Tools LE that came with the device too. Again, it needs to be an Intel or Universal Binary version.

hope this helps.

Check out. http://duc.digidesign.com/ too. It's the official digidesign forum for anything Mbox related.

 

[Killyp]

It may sound silly, but I would doubly check you are actually recording from the MBox and not the MacBook's built in mic. I've managed to do this once and couldn't work out why until I tapped a key on the keyboard and nearly blew my ears off.

 

[zimv20]

It may sound silly, but I would doubly check you are actually recording from the MBox and not the MacBook's built in mic.

that does seem like a possibility.

OP -- if you can post an audio file, it may give us a better clue.