Recording audio help

[Dr.Susse]

Gday I've been recording audio for various little things and I've always had the problem of that annoying static hiss.

My set up is;
A "Shure PG48 microphone"
plugged into a normal microphone lead then into an adapter(Stereo) and finally into the microphone port of my computer.
All audio recorded on audacity

It's not really an old computer so I don't think it's the sound card and I think it may just be a shit microphone.

So dose anyone have an idea of a better microphone to seek out or a better set up for recording various voice and instrument bits?

Thanks.

 

[SnowyGamester]

It could be anything, only way to find out is to test a few things. Would try without the extension cable first of all...the longer the cable the more chance there will be for noise to damage the signal. If that doesn't really help it's probs just a shoddy microphone, though judging by the price of it online I'd be pretty ticked off if it was causing substantial noise (I'd expect that from a $10 mic, not a $50 one). You could always pick up a USB sound card for cheap off ebay and see if that makes an improvement (I spent about $2 on one and it did a pretty ok job). Maybe test the mic with another computer and see if it does the same thing.

As far as your set up, other than buying better equipment there isn't much more to recording voice afaik. Though if you're recording instruments you may be able to plug directly into your PC to get better sound quality depending on the instrument-most guitars and modern keyboards often have audio output sockets of some description, probably other instruments too, I'm not a music man so I couldn't say.

 

[teaburns]

Could always invest in a cheap audio interface, instead of plugging directly into the soundcard. This is connected usually connected via USB (although the more expensive ones can support firewire) and they usually have a mike input and a guitar jack input. This is what I use to record guitars, vocals, etc.