Noise gating with a 528E and a Eureka...

[BTQ14]

I have a noisy room in which I do radio and TV voice overs. When I purchased the Eureka I was surprised to find when I hooked it up to my Mackie VLZ/PC based studio that it didn't clamp down on room noise. I thought all mic processors (like my Symetrix 528E) offered that feature. Still, I was very impressed with the Eureka's sound quality, so much so that I manually edited out all the room noise heard between VO takes.
Then I got to thinking...perhaps I could chain the 528E and the Eureka together. I could use the gate on the Symetrix with the processing of the Eureka, thus have the best of both worlds. I could bypass the 528E's EQ/Compressor stages and just use its noise gate, while keeping the superb processing of the Eureka.

Well...I did that, but now - while the room's noise has been effectively diminished - the audio quality now has a flatness and grit to it that wasn't there previously. Like I said, I bypassed the EQ/Compressor section on the 528E, so it shouldn't be affecting the final signal in any way other than room noise, but something is. I just don't know what.

[Dave Comeaux]

Are you plugging the mic into the 528 or the Eureka?

[BTQ14]

The mic is going into the 528E.

[Dave Comeaux]

Try it the other way around.

[BTQ14]

You know...when you asked the question I wondered why I hadn't tried that.
I'll do so and report back, thanks.

[jbSki]

I'd use the Symetrix 528E as an insert on the Eureka.

Since the 528E has individual input and output patches for each stage of its processing, you can connect the Eureka's Insert Send to any of the inputs to find the best setup. You may find bypassing either or both the preamp or output stage will result in the best quality. (I'd probably use the De-Esser input and then return the 528E from the EQ out to the Eureka's Insert Return.)

Conversely, you could patch the balanced line output of the 528E directly into the Eureka's Insert Return to bypass the Eureka's preamp stage instead.

[BTQ14]

I discovered what the problem was. The mic was, in fact, lined into the Eureka, then sent to the 528E...not the other way around, as I had originally thought.
It turns out that I was using both the compressor from the Eureka and the 528E.
I bypassed the Eureka's compressor and...um...eureka! The sound was cleaned up considerably.

Hi jbski,

I send the signal from the Eureka to the 528E's compressor/gate input, then return it to the Eureka.