Bruce Nik wrote: > I would like to know what type of tricks, tools, and environment you > use to achieve the best sound quality possible for Asterisk IVRs. I > am looking into in-house solutions rather than professional sound > recorders or Digium voice overs. Do you use a Doller Store > microphone? Do you use any specific software? Does a really expensive > Sony microphone makes much of a difference (3-way microphone)? Do > sound effects to normalize the sound help afterwards? How many Mhz do > you set the sound at? Stereo? Mono? Do you close the windows when > recording ? :) any feedback would be appreciated.
The trick here is some middle ground, paying extra for a name brand is not going to get you much, although if you are willing to spend a lot of money on doing all this in house you might as well just outsource in the first place, it will probably come out cheaper because even if you get a decent mic you still need a suitable room with all the egg carton type noise dampening. You don't really need a mixing desk these days, although PCs are noisy critters and you would need some kind of external sound card to get away from them, although most expensive mics aren't pre-amplified so you might need some kind of amplifier for the mic. As for recording, you record at the best possible settings you can, this is where a good sound card will also come in, it's quite easy to reduce quality, but you can't gain what isn't there in the first place. Depending if you are looking toward the future or not, at some point most phones will go beyond 8 khz to 16 or higher as wide band codecs become more prevalent and chip costs etc comes down. In any case to do it properly, you most of all need someone that understands how to do voice prompts properly, and this is quite difficult from what I've been told, because to flow properly the inflections and such that we normally use can't be present or it can sound weird when the computer joins it all together. All up, it can cost quite a lot to put a proper setup together, and then find a suitable person to do the recording, the cost of outsourcing would probably be a lot less and I'm sure the quality would end up a lot better. If you organised some kind of group buy I'm sure the cost would end up even lower. -- Best regards, Duane http://www.freeauth.org - Enterprise Two Factor Authentication http://www.nodedb.com - Think globally, network locally http://www.sydneywireless.com - Telecommunications Freedom http://e164.org - Global Communication for the 21st Century "In the long run the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip."
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