[Jonathan Hennessey]

No, not exactly. Not every moment of silence in the track is intentional.

I have been hearing that quality of the recording as well — the almost total silences between phrases. I can’t explain it, and I don’t find it appealing.

I **suspect** this is the reason why:

I’m going from the RE20 into the channel strip, and then from the channel strip into the MacBook (by way of the channel strip’s XLR out to the MacBook’s mini jack in).

In other words, I’ve been letting the onboard sound card handle the digital to audio conversion. Maybe I would get better results with a more high-quality digital–audio converter like the Apogee One.

Can anyone speak to that? Or perhaps it was a problem with compression?

[Jonathan Hennessey]

I agree some of the edits are a little close. I’ll be more careful when we actually get into production. Thank you.

As for the actor’s breaths, I didn’t edit them out per se but I did attenuate the sound — possibly too much. Do you think it would be more naturalistic if the breaths were kept at their recorded volume?

No, I didn’t use much EQ in this test. I wanted to see in what areas this actor’s voice might need some fine tuning.

If the consensus is that it sounds a little thin, I could drive the tube preamp up from 30% (this recorded level) to 40-50%, and EQ-wise, boost somewhere between 4-6 kHz.

[Jonathan Hennessey]

Gentlemen, thanks so much for your input! You’ve given me some solid direction and I couldn’t ask for anything more.