The Simplicity of Hardware – In the Home Voiceover Studio

How much time can we afford to spend “tinkering”? 

Did we plan to spend an extra hour digging under the hood to track down issues with software? How does affect our focus and creativity?

With studio setups, my strong bias is to allow things to be just complex enough that core needs are covered. With the general quality of gear available to us these days, hardware reliability is pretty much a given. Though voice actors often ask if there’s something “better” than commonly recommended interfaces, the one metric I keep coming back to is the number of trouble-free hours logged on devices such as Focusrite or SSL units. It also feels more comforting to have tactile controls versus mouse-set software sliders on a control app’s panel inside the computer. 

Over the years, my experience has been that when software starts failing, things can cascade quickly. We then find ourselves troubleshooting deeper computer system issues and trying to ferret out which odd incompatibility or expired software license has reared its ugly head to muck things up.  

That’s all time pulled away from the process of creativity behind the mic. The fun we have in the booth is the reason most of us got into this business to begin with. How can we maximize that?

A direct chain of connections and equipment between your microphone and your computer limits the variables of failure. With a minimum of investment in select backup gear, we can quickly troubleshoot from cheapest to most expensive. Spare cables and an extra interface or microphone let us swap out bits and get back up and running. Simple, reliable gear pays for itself many times over. “Retired” gear makes a good backup. 

Running things with software is a bit of a given these days. While I’m not about to start recording with actual tape again, I tend to be careful to acknowledge where that might create vulnerabilities. If there are specific settings which matter, I want to make sure I know what those are and be able to replicate them following a software crash. Most of the interfaces with software control panels allow you to save workspace details to your computer, but sometimes it’s not obvious or automatic. 

Certainly, newer devices allow flexible setups, and If your workflow demands more complexity, that’s a worthy way to solve those issues.

But, for much of what we do, simple works well, making things just complex enough, but no more. With that locked down, we get to be present behind the mic. 

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