This week's Pro Audio Suite episode is a deep dive into Austrian Audio's treasure chest, featuring the OC707, OC818 studio set, CC8, and OC7. Discover the groundbreaking features of these mics and why they might just revolutionize your audio work. Robbo, AP, and Robert share their firsthand experiences, from studio recording and on-the-road versatility to voiceover excellence. It's an unboxing and testing session filled with expert analysis, fun, and a whole lot of audio geekery. Don't miss out on this sonic adventure. A big shout out to our sponsors, Austrian Audio and Tri Booth. Both these companies are providers of QUALITY Audio Gear (we wouldn't partner with them unless they were), so please, if you're in the market for some new kit, do us a solid and check out their products, and be sure to tell em "Robbo, George, Robert, and AP sent you"... As a part of their generous support of our show, Tri Booth is offering $200 off a brand-new booth when you use the code TRIPAP200. So get onto their website now and secure your new booth... https://tribooth.com/ And if you're in the market for a new Mic or killer pair of headphones, check out Austrian Audio. They've got a great range of top-shelf gear.. https://austrian.audio/ We have launched a Patreon page in the hopes of being able to pay someone to help us get the show to more people and in turn help them with the same info we're sharing with you. If you aren't familiar with Patreon, it’s an easy way for those interested in our show to get exclusive content and updates before anyone else, along with a whole bunch of other "perks" just by contributing as little as $1 per month. Find out more here..   https://www.patreon.com/proaudiosuite     George has created a page strictly for Pro Audio Suite listeners, so check it out for the latest discounts and offers for TPAS listeners. https://georgethe.tech/tpas If you haven't filled out our survey on what you'd like to hear on the show, you can do it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZWT5BTD Join our Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/proaudiopodcast And the FB Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/357898255543203 For everything else (including joining our mailing list for exclusive previews and other goodies), check out our website https://www.theproaudiosuite.com/ “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.” Hunter S Thompson   [00:00:00] And welcome to another Pro Audio Suite thanks to Tribooth. You can see it in the background. Don't forget the code TRIPAP to get 200 off your purchase. Uh, Today we're going to do an unboxing right after this. So, George, you've got yourself a new microphone from Austrian audio Of course, one of our sponsors. Yes, it's Christmas early, extremely early in this case, [00:01:00] because I asked for this microphone a while ago and I wasn't sure if they'd send it to me because it is absolutely not. In the category of podcasting or voiceover. So I didn't think they were going to send it to me, but, they did because maybe they see what I see. And this is what I've got today to show you. And that's the You OC, not yet. OC 707. So this microphone has a lot in common with other mics. You guys are going to see from our unboxings. But this one kind of, to me, is like, I feel like, we should have done this last in a way, because I feel like it's the best of all the others, but all of us are going to tell us why their mic is the best, I think, right? So, OC707 is a small capsule condenser microphone. much like the pencil mic that we're going to see and the mic that, Robert's using. But it's just in the way that it's packaged. It's packaged as a handheld, right? So, why a handheld [00:02:00] vocal mic for voiceover or podcasting? Well, here's my, here was my thought. So, wouldn't it be nice to have a mic with a good internal pop filter? One. it's always there and it's always with you. Two, That's the unboxing part. Two, wouldn't it be nice if the mic had a decent amount of shock mounting internally, so the capsule wouldn't pick up rumble and stuff from wherever it's mounted? Yeah, sounds good, right? Well, that's the whole idea of a high quality handheld studio. Well, it's not studio. It's a live. It's just a handheld yeah. Mm-Hmm. mic, right? This is the whole idea of a mic like this. You're getting the quality of the capsule from their smaller diaphragm mics, but housed in a handheld form factor. So it can handle some handholding, meaning it will not pick up vibration. So if you mounted this to a mic arm or stuck it on a table or clamped it to a bed post or whatever it is you [00:03:00] need to put the mic, you're not going to get much rumble or low frequency noise, right? Another cool thing about the design of this mic, look at that crazy head basket. It actually it's like suspended it's it's sort of similar to my mic here where they have the capsule there, But the back of it accessible. I think that's part of their, um, a name for that tech. Yeah, they do have a name for that design, that design aspect, which I can't recall, But the idea is they're trying to make sure that there's no coloration that occurs because of the capsule being enclosed in any way at the rear. So that's the, the idea that this should give you the best off axis response, it should give you the smoothest off axis response. So before I go further and plug it in. Um, the only feature it has, really, if you call it that, is a switch. It does, uh, technology, Open Acoustics Technology. yeah, and does have a switch. The switch does engage a 120 hertz roll [00:04:00] off at the bottom end. What the slope is, I don't know. It's, I'm guessing it's probably as gentle, like a 6 dB per octave slope. But that is what you get on this mic. So without further ado, I'm going to plug it in, and it made a nice pop. I don't know if you guys heard the pop, did you? Even with the gain all the way down? So I'm going to go ahead and pot this up and let's see if you guys are catching it on your end. One, two, three. Yes, it's definitely coming up. yeah, And we'll pot down our other one. The OC 18. So now I'm on the OC 707. And, uh, tonally, it's very smooth, with what sounds to me like a little bit of a mid range, like, mid range, like, eh, eh, somewhere in the, hank, honk. there's like a little bit of a bump in the honk frequency. And that's, they did say that's by design, they actually said it has a little bit of a fuzz. forwardness at the two to three K range because they feel it [00:05:00] does help bring a vocal, um, out of the, you know, out of the mud, especially for live. guitars going on underneath you, that's gonna help. Yep. Absolutely. So, so if I was going to use this as a stand in for, uh, any of our other mics, my tendency would probably be to smooth that frequency out just to my ears and kind of put a little dip to smooth out that little bit of bump. But other than that, You're probably talking about like what 2 DB DB or so. And that's, what's crazy. You don't think two DB is that big a deal, but it's amazing when you hear, we are so tuned to hear our own voice or really human voice through a microphone. Right. And it's just, we've heard it so much. So there's any anomaly in, you know, in the frequencies, you pick it out really quick, right? But if it was a bass guitar and you added two DB of a certain frequency, it wouldn't be so dreadfully obvious. So, That's always interesting with mics. But anyway, that's the O. C. and whole. have the two mics set up so you can pot between the two, like go from the [00:06:00] 818 to the OC 707? I can do that. It'd be interesting to get like an equal distance and just kind of play around with that. Before you do that, how does it handle off axis stuff? Like if you're a bit off axis, does it get a bit lost? Yeah, we can try that. So, so I'm I'm gripping it, like, kind of like death grip singer grip and you're not hearing any. OK, if I really squeeze it, there's a little, if I move my thumb around, go. Yeah. the amount of handholding you get. But. If you hold it the proper way, as Steve Jobs would say, the correct way to hold the phone, um, by the, by the fingers like this, you get very, very minimal, um, I'm not using any high pass filters. This is right off the mic. So, so in terms of off axis, if I start speaking mic across the microphone now, and now I'm speaking at it at about, now I'm about 90 degrees. Yeah. right? One. And Definitely loses the low end and yeah, and there's the [00:07:00] rear rejection Notice the rear rejection is The rear rejection. 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, in your face, because we 2. Yeah, it has an amazing rear rejection. A bit for it to sort of sound off axis. yeah, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2. 1, 2, 1, then all of a sudden the low end really plummeted and it kind of retained some of the high end for a bit as it so very smooth off axis. And what does that mean to you as a voiceover actor or whatever, podcaster? It means that you can move around the microphone quite a bit. If it's mounted on a s