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Place the NT-USB at 15cm from your mouth.
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By default, you’ll notice the gain setting for the Røde microphone to be identical as the setting for any microphone, i.e. As soon as you connected the NT-USB, the microphone appeared in both the Inout and Outout tabs. Open OS X’s System Preferences panel and select the Sound tab. I’m assuming you have your NT-USB mounted on its included mic stand with the pop filter in place. A direct connection is always preferred when working with audio equipment, but if you don’t have open USB ports, a hub will do fine too. If you have one available on your Mac, use that one. The first thing we’ll need to do is connect the NT-USB to a USB port. I used Audio Engineering’s Spectre for metering, Logic Pro X and Sound Forge 2. As for audio editors, Audio Hijack is great, but Sony Sound Forge Pro 2 is better because it has more features that we can use for optimisation of the input signal. Your DAW could be Logic Pro X, Reason or ProTools. You’ll need a DAW (Digital Audio Station – music creation software) or an audio editor, a Røde NT-USB mic and a Mac for this setup walkthrough. Here is how you set it for optimum results.
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The NT-USB has an optimised gain for its internal circuits, but unless you have a loud voice, that gain setting may be too low. To get best results from a USB microphone you need to set the gain correctly. USB microphones have one major benefit: you don’t need a driver or an ADC (Analogue-Digital-Converter) to make it work.
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