VoiceOver recording in a noisy environment? Is it possible? We tested it for you!

Are you bothered by ambient noise when recording VoiceOver, Dubbing, etc.?

Do disturbing sounds from the street often get into your recording and spoil it?

SPB double wall soundproof booths are a great solution!

Our soundproof, double-walled booths can easily handle a neighbor mowing the grass, an ambulance driving by your house while you're recording, or even a neighbor's dog that starts barking every time you press the record button.

We often get questions from you, about how specifically the booth copes with a certain type of noise at a certain volume, and since it is not possible to do a separate test for each customer individually, we decided to do a big test that will hopefully answer all the questions and confirm at the same time the quality of our double wall booths.


Test description

We're testing the SPB33D specifically, but any double wall booth, regardless of size, would achieve the same results - you can view all types by clicking here

Disturbing noises

We've created an audio track containing 9 of the most common distracting noises you might encounter.

Of course, we were not able to include every disturbing noise in the test, as the test would then take several hours, but we tried to select the ones that you ask us about most often and we believe that this will be enough to give you an idea of the noise reduction properties of double-wall booths.

In front of the building, we have placed professional iLoud Micro speakers from which we emit disturbing noises at the highest volume. We wanted the noise in the room to be as loud as possible, as we understand that everyone has a different level of noise in the room, and for that reason we went a little overboard with the volume to make the test result valid for everyone.

Voice playback

Since no one records only silence, we decided to imitate VoiceOver recording.

For maximum consistency, which is crucial for the objectivity of the test, we decided to play the voice from a professional iLoud MTM speaker, which we placed in the same position and distance from the microphone each time, so that the recorded volume of the voice was the same in front of the booth and inside the booth.

 

Test recording

As I already indicated, the first part of the test takes place in front of the booth and the second inside the booth. We recorded everything on two microphones, the SE X1S and our VBM 90. We recorded on two microphones just for checking, but the result you can hear is recorded on the SE X1S.

For the purpose of a better comparison, we have edited the recordings from outside and inside the booth so that it is as easy as possible to find the sound that is disturbing you and compare the result.

Result

And how did it all turn out? Well, judge for yourself, we're more than happy with the results.

Video link:

 youtube.com/watch?v=s82kGmvxWYQ

You must have noticed that there is no recording of separate noises inside the booth in the video. We decided not to put it there, considering the length of the video, but if you are interested, you can listen to it, together with all the uncut recordings, here:
soundcloud.com/user-179117028/sets/spb33d_eng_test

We hope that this test will help you in making a decision, and if you still have any questions that were not answered by this test, do not hesitate to contact us, here are contacts.

View all our double wall booths here.