Bob Bickerton wrote: ↑Sun Aug 07, 2022 9:55 pm
I’ve been following this thread and the above reply rang alarm bells for me.
If you’re recording vocals in an untreated room you’ll have a significant problem! Room treatment really needs to be near the top of your ‘purchase list’.
I was just agreeing with Dave that it probably makes more sense to get monitors that are excellent for vocal work, rather than getting ones that are better with the lower frequencies, which will either have poorer mids or be much more expensive, and then spending thousands trying to treat a domestic room to make it work OK with deep bass. I wasn't suggesting that the room won't need any treatment to be able to do vocal work, just that it will be a lot cheaper.
At the beginning of the thread you were also looking at a vocal microphone. I don’t know if it was covered earlier, but the quality of the interface pales into insignificance relative to microphone choice and room treatment. Did you buy the Aston?
I haven't bought the Aston yet. I've also been looking at other mics like the Shure SM7B and the AKG C214 but I haven't decided yet.
Regarding interface I’ve never had a problem with latency and it’s a good idea not to commit any effects on your (self-recorded) vocals on the way in - so probably all you need is some comfort reverb for tracking and I’d have thought most interfaces would offer that with minimal penalty.
Yeah, I wouldn't commit any effects but a bit of reverb, maybe some compression, helps and I think they need to be DSP effects to avoid any noticeable latency.
Regarding interfaces, I’m a UAD Apollo user and, as said above, I only use reverb for monitoring. No problems there, but I do have a range of vocal mics and professionally designed room treatment. I also happily use an SSL 2 or MixPre 10 as an interface. If I was buying new I’d consider RME based on the very good comments around here, but I doubt anyone listening to my projects would notice the difference as to which interface I used! The point regarding UAD plugs-ins is worthy of repeating. I enjoy them very much, but there are now many good alternatives.
I was originally considering a UAD interface but I crossed them off when they abandoned the USB interface and went Firewire only. They have DSP effects of course, which the much cheaper SSL 2 doesn't. I'll probably just pre-order the Babyface Pro FS, as I've found somewhere that says it should have stock by August 19.