The Flying Sloth

No Phantom power will fix far less than actually using a mic preamp (which will already have phantom). You should be looking for an audio interface, take a look at the guide in my signature.

Kbear KS2 are killer IEMs on a budget

Not essential by any means. Using a UMC202HD will give you more than enough IO for running monitors and your M50s, also gives you two XLR inputs in case you ever want to record wit XLR / TRS

UMC202HD is fairly easy to use if you just want to use normal analogue headphones. You could use voicemeeter as a free option with the yeti and headset you already have though.

Monitors definitely do not need to be turned to an extremely high volume to produce precise audio, for that budget you list you could easily purchase a decent set of monitors (say the Tannoy Reveal 802) as well as an Audio interface (UMC1820 or higher quality lower channel count interface depending on your production requirements) AND a decent set of studio headphones (ATH M40x, Beyerdynamic DT 770/990) which would still leave some budget left over (depending on price of interface) for microphones if you needed some. What kind of music production are you doing? Do you need lots of mic channels?

Completely agree, If you're writing a guide, you should start by reading the other pre-existing guides and creating some contet for yourself. Once you've started off we will have a better frame of reference for what you're looking for. For instance, @Derkoli has hundred thousand dollar speakers, obviously they sound great and I'd imagine he'd recommend them, but that's not a fair fight against the budget options others have mentioned. Many of us who have spent time with audio gear ina professional capacity will have drawers or cubboards of gear and unless we know what you want our opinions on we can't help too much.

Other replies are correct, get closer to the mic, turn down the gain, use a gate, try using an intelligent filter like RTX voice but if that degrades your audio quality too much RX8 or Klevgrand Brusfri are great at removing specific, persistant background noises.

Some good picks but this is untrue, unless you have golden ears and a perfect listening system phase inversion analysis and blind AB comparisons tell us that MP3 files at 320kbps are functionally identical to FLAC of any bitrate (The FL in FLAC stands for fully lossless after all). You want wide?, I'll give you wide, after your bog standard Pink Floyd picks we get into the electronic music genre where Exyl probably has the W I D E S T sound I've heard in a while. MOAI, PING and Nice Logo come to mind. INZO has some nice vibes similarly.

I have a guide linked in my signature explaining inputs and my recommendations, take a look there for more in-depth takes on mics and other studio options If you want some other recommendations from my personal experience here goes - Now to be clear, I am financially able to replace the below hardware with much more expensive options if I felt the need to, I just don't feel the need to, beyond this point seems like diminishing returns to me. Over-ears on a budget: ATH-M20x have been my daily drivers for years, it's widely known that the M40x have a flatter sound signiture and are better for production work than the M50x but it's not widely known that the cheapest set in the lineup aren't too bad themselves. I don't do any critical listening with them and mostly their job is delegated to providing me with audio when it's either too late to use my speakers or I'm in calls. Not overly bassy, no crazy harsh highs, overall, they're not HD800s but for the price they do a damn good job (and I got them for under $20) In-ears on a budget: It's no secret that I love products by KZ but semi-recently I decided to give the KBear KS2 a try and man do they sound good. Same form factor that I love from the KZ wired IEMs I've used previously and honestly the inline mic is excellent. I work in a field with lots of collaboration so in COVID times working from home I'm prettymuch in voice calls all day and these provide both the audio from my phone and input to my phone (yes I'm aware of the Microsoft My Phone feature and Dell Mobile COnnect but they have massive technical issues). Again, these serve a similar purpose to the M20x when I'm not working, just another option if my speakers would be too loud but DAMN the bass is clear. For inears at this price point (about $20) the clarity and depth is honestly amazing. Wireless In-ears on a budget. KZ SK10, that's it, they're the best budget inears. I mean, of course they're no hyper-premium set so there's the standard white noise you expect from the price point but I use these when shopping, exercising, running, cooking, just basically everything. Great battery life and the bass is far clearer than my old inears be they wired or wireless (KZ ZS3, ATE, ATR, S1, etc etc). I'm not the sort of person to look at a spec sheet and decide whether I like something based on the specs but dang this newer generation of hybrid inears really do it for me. Speakers on a budget: Any decent used studio monitors. Personally I use the Tannoy Reveal 5A and I have done so for more than half a decade. Looik at your local classifieds, see if there are any studio monitors that are decent, check reviews, do your research, brands to watch out for are KRK, Yamaha, Tannoy, Adam Audio, Focal and Fostex to name a few but I stress this list is nowhere near exhaustive. Studio monitors are designed specifically to provide excellent audio quality and 99/100 will beat any consumer option at double the price. If you don't have any studio monitors near you the Tannoy Reveal lineup is excellent for the price. Other speaker option is to just build your own, I had an old surround sound receiver / sub and I wanted some more fun speakers than my clinical R5As so I obtained / built some custom speakers and wired them up, now in my bedroom I have a full surround sound system fo when I'm watching shows in bed (though I usually only run the system as a 2.1 ch)

Sounds like you want a headphone amp I was going to suggest the same class of product but slightly cheaper, the HA400 Thomann is the best place to purchase Behringer products if you're in Europe though I believe some places may have it cheaper if you're US based.

Above answer is prettymuch right, take a look at the guide in my sig if you want further info but the short answer is if you have background noise go Dynamic, if you don't get condenser

The only reason I ask is that step one of problem solving is to see if you can avoid the problem, is there any particular reason you can't just run the speech to text from the baremetal? Like, it sounds as though you don't want any audio playing whatsoever from the physical PC, you want all of it coming from the VM, so, why even use a VM if you can run it all natively and plumb it into OBS ?

Why do you need audio going into the VM ?

Thanks for the share, Personally I use a UMC1820 which is fairly comparable to the interface you are using here, I often have multiple outputs connected whether it be to run through outboard processing or simply to have my studio monitors and the surround sound playing audio simultaniously. For anyone else considering a multiple output solution be aware that your output of choice doesn't necessarily have to have a passthrough like this subwoofer did, you can alweays just duplicate the output through one of the other outputs on your interface providing it has the ability to do this. Personallym, I always have earbuds, over-ear headphones, monitors and the surround sound system (though only running as a stereo output) connected through the various outputs and with the two dedicated headphone amps for the personal listening devices there are more than enough other outputs to accomodate both speaker solutions. I also read through your other post on the USB sharing which intrigued me somewhat, is there any particular reason you use the Mac for audio productionj over the clearly more powerful PC ? (other than enjoying Logic of course, well, that and bootcamp being a pain in the ass I suppose). Thanks for sharing, Sloth

The stand you have pictured looks exaclly like the Ebay 'sort by cheapest' mic stand I have on my desk. In a pinch Ikea has lamps on a scissor arm that are much sturdier that I've seen used as mic stands before. SHort answer is that almost any scissor arm can do that.

No, he's not, in fact he specifically says he knows people can't build it cheaper because he gets parts at wholesale. He's not claiming it costs more because of his 'extensive knowledge' and even if he were that's anj absolute load because no amount of bios or OS tweaks will make the damn thing have significant performance improvements unless the machines were incorrectly configured in the first place (beyong considering overclocking). You keep relying on the server example which is not at all relevant here. The servers are expensive because of the support available but we have already seen that there is not such support available for these machines and the warranty is worded specifically to not cover use with other hardware which literally everyong using the maching for music prodiction (except entirely ITB outfits) needs to do. I understand your point, that no matter what it is, adding ram to a barebones chassis or adding a thermocouple to a Raspberry PI it's a value add and as such the price goes up. I just think it's a stupid point because in all other instances the insane value add is because there is a niche that requires specific hardware/software and for it to work. The servers actually require configuration and have support to ensure downtime is minimal, the pharma lab required specialist hardware (no matter the price) with full support again ensuring that downtime was minimal for a mission critical role. This man is selling computers for a job that any old computer could complete for, there is no meaningful niche. THis is more along the lines of Daniel Wellington watches, they're literally $2 aliexpress jobbies with a brand label on them that they then charge hundreds for, that's precisely what Slick Audio is doing, getting a generic product, throwing their brand on it and calling a day all while explaining at you how good of a deal you're getting because you could never build it yourself for less. This is where you and I differ, I'm niot a supporter of ripping off consumers with rebadged OEM products, having said thatm your example here isn't relevant. See, adding a band logo is actually a value add as the shirts are now appropriate for sale to a new market that otherwise would not purchase them. Adding the logo likely also meant that there were licensing fees payable to the bands and beyond that, everyone knows a shirt is a shirt, nobody is under the impression that a band shirt is any better at being a shirt than any other shirt based on the comments of the owner. The owner didn't make any 'tweaks' to make the shirt perform better, it's transparent, you're paying extra because you decided you wanted a shirt with a logo on it. Typing that out, maybe you're not as far off as I thought, you're paying for a logo. The difference is that the band doesn't pretend they designed the underlying shirt. Daniel wellington portrays themselves as the designer of their watches just like Slick Audio does their computers. There's a reason those who enjoy watches have absolute distain for Daniel Wellington and it is for exactly the reasons I have outlined, the exact same reason Slick Audio should be held in the same contempt. The brand label on a Slick Audio machine (it's a sticker, they just puit a sticker on them) does not inherently open up the market to new sectors that the produict would not otherwise have been able to reach, where a branded shirt appeals to the followers of the band and increases overall sales nobody would have otherwise not purchased a computer without the Slick Audio branding. I'm not saying that their computers don't work, I'm not saying that there is no value in the business of prebuilt computers (comparing the extra cost of most prebuilts to this would only make Slick look worse), but what I am saying is that it is disingenuous to cllaim that nobody could build a machine cheaper than you do and that your machine will perform better when in reality the only value you have added is that of the sticker you put on it. I know you're going to want to bring up the server example again, or the pharma company but you must understand, much of that value add was for support, something that is not a consideration here. I have no interest in discussing this further, we are too far off topic.

I'd have to go through Glenn's old YT videos to find it but in short, Glenn was called out for supporting something that is very clearly just a rebadged Clevo for double the price and in a followup video (a Q&A soon after IIRC) he confirmed he had spoken to the owner of Slick Audio and that only the case was provided by Clevo. Similar top what the owner of the brand is claiming here after being called out for selling rebadged NUCS. the owner chastises those who would dare say such a thing because he has tweaked the bios to make the PC sound better or something..... Honestly not quite sure what his point is. For more hilarity you can see this thread and a very similar one here Believe me, I understand the cost of downtime but unfortunately Slick isn't the kind of outfit to have a tech sent to your location to resolve issues, rather, they're the type that offers you an upsell to a 3 year warranty that requires you to send your $10,915 clevo rebadge to them for repair. I'd be more than happy to accept this argument if the warranty was not specifically written to remove coverage in the case of "Operation of the Products in conjunction with equipment, software or other items manufactured or sold by any third-party or the Purchaser." which coincidentally is exactly what anyone using the machine for it's intended purpose would do.... We're not talking about expensive servers where uptime is crucial here, we're talking about rebadged clevos. With the aforementioned support (or lack thereof) and sheer immensity of knowledge required to bulk order generic laptops and charge double for them because of your 'tweaks to the bios' we should all be multi-billionaires.

Place the two audio tracks into a program like audacity, align them precisely and invert the phase of one. The only sound you will hear is the difference between the two files as any identical frequencies played against one another with inverted phase will cancel out.

Jesus Christ, I thought "oxygen free phase aligned linear crystalline low impedance" audio cables were as whacky as they would get but this is just next level. Digital audio (or any other digital signal) by nature of being digital alone does not degrade like analogue signals and in 99% of cases, so long as the cable has the correct contacts and impedance it will perform exactly the same as absolutely everything else. Genuinely this makes me fear for the sanity of the wider audiophile community.... This actually reminds me of a fairly prolific brand in the studio space called Slick Audio. They sell your bog standard Clevo and NUC rebrands claiming they have been optimised for use in studios to justify doubling the price. A YouTuber named Glenn Fricker got absolutely lost in the sauce with them and it was absolutely painful to listen to. They are straight up just windows machines with nothing special but the brand claims to have designed custom circuit boards for them and only use the outer shell of the Clevo.......

Do a phase inversion analysis to see what difference there really is but you're correct, the right has almost no dynamic range...

Is it actually too loud or is the mic picking up your your breathing and distorting? Is it blowing people away when speaking on Discord or everywhere? as in, in games as well? If it's far too loud you could always move further away from the microphone but this does seem odd to me in that I've not ever found that interface to provide too much gain or the 2020 to be extremely an hot signal, if the issues are just in Discord, Discord is extremely painful when using audio interfaces and often decides to boost or reduce volume by insane amounts.

Sorry, that's my bad I've not used the MV7 myself and it seems was misled by a review. As a general rule I tend to recommend inline preamps with large diaphragm dynamic mics purely because of the gain/sensitivity issues they face but I've not heard of the MV7 being particularly difficult to drive especiallt since the goXLR can power a SM7B by some accounts with littlew issue. If possible it might be worth taking a look at something like the Klark Teknik CT1 / Fethead / Cloudlifter which will significantly boost the gain and hopefully fix these issues.

Due to the relative scarcity of the chips and the general PITA that system upgrades are for those who need to keep all their data (moreso with VSTs) I'd hazard a guess it's unlikely anyone here is running a DAW on 12th gen chips. Especially given you've already asked this question in the Ableton and VI-CONTROl forums with no real answers. What I can say is that I am yet to have an issue running any DAW on my Ryzen systems even when running far too many Kontakt instances. Ryzen performance in windows based DAWs is a known qualtity and if my anecdotal experience in Reaper, FL, Ableton and ProTools is indicative of the wider market I'd say that you should either wait for Alder lake to be readily available and see the performance or you should bite the bullet and go with what we know to be an excellent solution already.

Are you using the gain switch on the MV7? That should fix the issues you're having where you're needing to turn up your gain excessively. If you're still having isses after 36DB of inline gain and your Discord gain settings are configured correctly then the GoXLR may have a fault. Discord is always a bit interesting with how it handles gain too, often interfaces may have far too little gain until drivers are installed so it may be worth reinstalling the drivers, beyond that, I'm not too sure, I generally try and stay away from gimmicky stuff like the GoXLR so I don't have any real hands-on experience.

If the connection between sub and speakers is your classic analogue connection and they can be used independant of one another I see no reason you would not be able to use a different brand should you choose to do so, whether or not it's 'Worth it' is entirely up to you though.