[Richard Crowley]

Recommend plugging your SM7B directly into the Yamaha AG06. You can probably send all the DBX gear back for a refund. For that matter, is that big old SM7B really appropriate for what you are doing (and WHERE)? Remember that a very large portion of the “sound” is a function of the space you are in. A pile of gear taller than you can’t compensate for poor acoustics, etc.

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Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.

[Richard Crowley]

Remember that just because other people are using something doesn’t mean that YOU need it. And it doesn’t even mean that THEY need it or are getting benefit from it. It is puzzling that anyone would buy any of that without confirming first that they actually NEED it.????

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Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.

[Richard Crowley]

Yes, a common XLR-male to XLR-female “mic cable” to connect the SM7B microphone to the 286 mic preamp.

Then you have two options for the 131 graphic EQ…
1) You can use it as an “INSERT” out of the 286, through the 13,1 and then back into the 286. This would require a special insert cable. Example: Hosa STP-201
2) Or, you can simply connect the output of the 286 to the input of the 131, and the output of the 131 to the 166.

Yes, except for the insert cable, you would use an ordinary TRS to TRS cable for all the other connections.

It does seem odd, however that you have all this gear but don’t seem to know how to use it. How did you happen to get all this and why do you think you need it?

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Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.

[Richard Crowley]

TRS is NOT “stereo” except in the case of headphones.
TRS can be (and typically is) MONO BALANCED line-level.
Sometimes TRS is send/return in the case of inserts.

If you want to tell us exactly what you want to connect to which, we can offer you expert advice.

Remember that if you use a TRS cable with a TS unbalanced source and a TRS balanced destination, you will very probably end up with an open circuit and no audio.

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Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.

[Richard Crowley]

Note that posting a compressed clip (MP3) doesn’t do your case any good. It might be possible there is something salvageable there, but the stereo MP3 compression algorithm has completely destroyed any hope of recovery. If you want detailed analysis of your sample, you must post an uncompressed (WAV, AIFF, etc.) sample. If the recording was made in a compressed format (like MP3) then you are probably out of luck. It is NEVER a good idea to record audio using a compressed method. We always record raw audio data (WAV, AIFF, etc.) for production and NEVER compress it until after the final mix when we need to distribute the product online, etc.

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Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.

[Richard Crowley]

Sorry. Are you sure you posted the correct sound clip? If you hadn’t claimed that it was a recording of a conversation, I would never have imagined that it was anything of the sort. Every once in a while I think I can hear a few phrases of something that sounds like human speech. But if you hadn’t warned us, I would have dismissed it as just more random noise.

If this were important to international terrorist activity, the NSA may be able to pull something intelligible out of it with several hours work on their supercomputer farms. But for the first time ever online, I have to say that there is zero chance of pulling anything even forensic-grade intelligible from this recording, much less something fit for a production.

It sounds like it was a horrible failure of trying to record dialog with a stereo (or M/S?) microphone where the dialog was completely cancelled out and only the noise remains. We sometimes hear that kind of effect when people plug a monaural microphone into a stereo mic input and end up recording the proper signal on the left channel, and opposite-polarity audio on the right channel. Then whey it is played back in monaural (with L+R), the signal almost completely cancels itself.

If you care to discuss exactly HOW this recording was made (conditions, gear, technique, cabling, etc.) we could probably help you avoid this problem in the future. But I feel pretty confident that even audio recovery software that costs more than your car couldn’t save this recording.

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Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.

[Richard Crowley]

That “Novation Audiohub 2×4 Combined Audio Interface and USB 2.0 Hub” is not an audio mixer in any sense of the word.
There are no audio mixers that will mix multiple USB audio inputs that I have ever seen or even heard of.

People who use USB microphones are typically using only one microphone and most (all?) software applications will recognize only one USB audio source at a time. Now the USB source may be multi-channel (typically 2-channel stereo).

The reason there are no “USB mixers” is because there are almost no “use cases” of people needing to mix multiple USB audio sources.

Your USB microphones will be useful for applications where you need only one microphone (perhaps a solo podcast or recording voice tracks, etc.) If you need to mix multiple microphones, there are a myriad of selections of conventional XLR microphones and XLR mixers. Many of the XLR mixers have a USB sound interface built in so that the result of the XLR mixer can be plugged directly into your computer for streaming, recording, communication, or whatever.

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Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.

[Richard Crowley]

There is no hard and fast rule. You must use your own judgement to decide the risk vs. benefit of recording at higher average levels. Here is one of my favorite parables which just happens to apply here…

There was once a magical land where the king resided in fabulous castle with his family and royal courtesans. The castle had an amazing view of the kingdom from the top of a craggy mountain. You could see for miles in every direction. The downside was that the only way up to the castle was a narrow road which in places was hewn into the side of the rocky cliff. The roadway was barely wide enough for the king’s carriage and team of horses.

At the retirement of his most trusted driver, it came time to interview candidates for the job. The king asked each candidate: “How close to the edge of the road can you safely drive my carriage with my family in it?” Candidate A said: “I can drive within 1 foot of the edge safely.” Candidate B said: “I am so good, I can drive within 6 inches of the edge safely!” But then candidate C said: “Honorable King, with such a precious cargo as your wife and children, I would stay as far away from the edge as possible.” Guess who got the job.

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Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.

[Richard Crowley]

The Zoom “H” series is pro-sumer at best. However, recently Zoom have started making a couple of more professional-level products, the F4 and F8 recorders. They appear to have significantly improved performance and build quality compared to the little plastic “shaver” F-series recorders.

NO, The 3.5mm input is TRS and stereo. It is NOT balanced at all. You can’t do balanced stereo with only 3 conductors (T, R, S) Stereo on any TRS plug is UN-balanced by definition. Always.

Because the input to the Zoom recorder is unbalanced, then you need UNbalanced, TS plugs at the source (the Roland Tri-Capture).

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Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.

[Richard Crowley]

I am confused, also. Somehow in 116 pages of English-language manual they never actually explained the TRS inputs of the combo “1/2 INPUTS”. So it is not at all clear whether the 1/4 TRS inputs can be used as line-level, mic-level or instrument-level. This is a gross failure on their part, but unfortunately it is all too common for this pro-sumer gear to have documentation that is so “dumbed-down” it is practically useless.

Upon closer inspection of the (poor) documenation, it appears that the only input that is identified as “line-level” is the 3.5mm “MIC/LINE input jack” on the upper right side. That means you would need to use a “stereo break-out” cable like this to connect the outputs from your Roland Tri-Capture to the 3.5mm TRS “MIC/LINE input jack” on your H5.

https://hosatech.com/product/cmp-150/

This is just one example from Hosa. There are many other similar cables that would work exactly the same.

I found the manual here: https://www.zoom.co.jp/sites/default/files/products/downloads/pdfs/E_H5_0.pdf
And on page 98 is the only information I found on configuring the H5 for line-level input.

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Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.