Disruptive Conversations

There's a very twisted irony in the fact that I don't use the Levelator very often at all... but after I wrote the post early this morning about the Levelator, it would wind up being a key tool for me to use this day.  I had an interview scheduled in the early afternoon for an prototype of an internal podcast we're working on.  Just minutes before I was to do the interview, I determined that something was wacky on my laptop and my normal route of using a softphone on the laptop with a mix-minus from my condenser mic was not going to work.   Not having the time to diagnose the problem and not wanting to lose the interview window, I went to Plan B (well, it should be Plan Z, as in "just don't do it", but it was B) and grabbed my JK Audio QuickTap from the closet, inserted it inline between the handset and one of my teleworker phones, and ran a cable over to an input on my mixer. As I did this, I was dearly hoping the Levelator could help out... or I was going to be re-recording another day.

You see, the problem with the QuickTap is this - you get both sides of the conversation on a single track, and I'm right there talking into the handset microphone, and the other person is on the other end of a phone connection.  The result is almost always: I'm loud and the other person is soft.  Maybe others have different results, but that's almost always how it is for me.

However, the Levelator did save the day.  Dumped the recording to a WAV file, dropped it on the Levelator and opened up the levelated file.  Ta da... the levels were at least much nearer to each other.  Not the quality that I'd get out of my regular audio rig (because of the handset microphones and QuickTap), but certainly acceptable and a decent way to recover.

Just very ironic given my post this morning...