February 27, 2022
I’ve tried to get in to streaming in the past, and thanks to the pandemic, a LOT of people were doing it quite successfully… however they were streaming their voice, and most of those that were streaming music, over ZOOM it was in mono or some distorted version of stereo.
I wanted to do better… kind of make my own method that let me stream good quality audio in stereo to whomever was watching me, but it took a lot of time, research, effort and testing.
A big part of it was in using the Mac MINI M1 along with some key hardware and software, and a lot of time on Youtube, lots of testing, back to youTube, more testing, some swearing, more testing and finally months later… success! I’ve learned SO MUCH about how to get good sound and stream it and I really enjoyed the process. Sometimes the learning process (the journey) is so much more fun than arriving at the destination.
Right now the heart of the set-up is the QSC TouchMix 8 mixer. To that I connect the BK-7m, my FR-8X accordion and a mic or two. It outputs sound to a 150 watt small computer speaker setup that is a 2.1 setup (satellite speakers and a woofer). The mixer also outputs the stereo signal through to my Zoom F4 field recorder while in audio interface mode. From there it’s all software that is picked up by the ZOOM meeting software and sent on to the people viewing.
One of the challenges was in getting good quality voice output, so the Neewer NW-410 microphone was used and that worked well, but picked up everything, including the background. The solution was simple, switch to a dynamic mic and my old Radio Shack equivalent of the SM59 was up for the task, and it worked great, except the wire got in the way. I needed something small, wireless and that had great sound AND had a mute switch.
This brings me to my latest acquisition, the Godox MoveLink M2, a wireless lavalier system that is really affordable, but really good!
Here are a couple videos from YouTube:
For me they work REALLY well, mostly because of how I use them… in my live streaming setup and educational videos that I make, so my distances are perhaps 1/20th of their max and they have a pretty good sound to start off with and add a little tweaking and they sound really good!
This weekend I’ll be testing them out on a live streaming event with some friends.
That’s it for now… enjoy!