- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
With the amount of soyface shill videos that pop up on YouTube when looking it up I believe that it's been overhyped by people who paired the SM7B with audio interfaces that were too weak to run it. The combo that Null has, which is Shure SM7B, Cloudlifter CL-1 and Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 seems to be shilled by absolutely every cahntent creator, and it seems to be a severe case of monkey-see-monkey-do with zero knowledge.
Tomasz Wróblewski of 0db.pl replied to a comment under his video about the 4th gen Scarlett interfaces remarking on how in his opinion the SM7B became so popular because of the lockdowns. Everyone went online, there was a big boom on home studios and content creation, and since the SM7B was an industry standard in radio stations and other professional environments, home users started buying that.
Here's the issue with all of it. In those professional environments, you have consoles and audio equipment that has more than enough power to drive the SM7B. Those are purpose built devices that pull the power directly from the mains, and it's also why the very high impedance headphones, like the Beyerdynamic DT770/990 Pro have 250ohms. They're designed for studio use, as is the Shure SM7B.
If you want to run stuff like that at home, you need audio interfaces that can supply that amount of power. The issue is that at home you're most likely going to power your things off of USB that delivers a measly 5V and 1.5A at most, since you will plug it in via USB-A. Anything above requires a USB-C connection on both ends and the right support for either multi-lane USB-C that effectively doubles the amperage, or Power Delivery, which you definitely won't have in your PC just for the audio interface.
The most popular consumer audio interface for creation is the Focusrite Scarlett range. It's not that good, for years it had a very weak headphone amp and microphone gain, as Focusrite wouldn't assume that absolutely everyone would use the SM7B, and it was more tuned to less demanding microphones, mainly for instrument recording. Most importantly, you power it off of a USB cable with that measly USB 2.0 5V and 1.5A. It's not enough to power studio grade equipment well, and really hard to give it that boost without causing problems.
The hype train told people to pair an underpowered consumer audio interface with a high grade studio microphone, and this inevitably lead to people noticing that their microphone sounds bad. The big selling point of the SM7B is that you can go all up into it, sound very bass heavy and not have any unwanted noises or effects. But you achieve that radio voice when you power it right. The Focusrite Scarlett doesn't do that. Only the newest generation released less than a year ago can do it, and they've added a second USB-C input for power to compensate for it.
So, people are having issues with this trendy setup. What's the solution? Cloudfilter CL-1 to magically boost it up to work on the underpowered audio interface. You're investing your money into an accessory that you wouldn't need if you made a more conscious decision when buying your audio interface. And correct me if I wrong, but from what I remember this type of passive boosting of a weak signal to make it reach the baseline isn't good or effective, so it might lead to issues. Null's SM7B sounds way too tinny for how it's supposed to sound, so it's possible it's a power issue. Maybe the USB port isn't supplying enough power, so the preamp doesn't have enough gain and Cloudlifter doesn't save it.
When looking up Shure SM7B's specifications I stumbled upon this video where the guy says all the right things when it comes to the sense of this combo:
IMO there is something very wrong with Null's hardware setup. He bought into the meme consoomer audio setup of an SM7B, Focusrite Scarlett and a Cloudlifter, doesn't know how pro audio works because the people who astroturf this combo don't know how pro audio works, and this leads to issues. If it was fine on a hardware level, he should be able to talk directly into the shroud and have a radio voice without any software fuckery. With the right setup, you just sound right with the raw output from the audio interface. You shouldn't be peaking, you should have a radio sound, and you shouldn't have any background noise, and you'd have to do basically zero adjustments software side. If you're forced to do adjustments software side, you're compensating for the faults of your current hardware setup.
There is also a possibility that his overpriced meme combo of the SM7B, Focusrite Scarlett and Cloudlifter is working as intended, but Null doesn't realize that with the SM7B you have to talk directly into the top of it and not the side, which is the source of all his current audio quality and level problems. But it's possible that he'll yell at me that he's not that retarded, that all of his shit is configured properly and the issue lies somewhere else.
