A Geek Goes Flying

At least, the basics. I was a non-linear editing wunderkind a billion years ago, when Premiere 4.2 was the bees knees (as long as you could work around the audio sync drift that happened because Premiere 4.2 couldn’t properly grok 29.97 fps). I was a beta tester for Premiere 5, and Premiere 5.1 shipped with my Pinnacle DC30pro . (Back in the days when things like “miroINSTANT Video® render reducing playback plug-in” were godsends. Remembering the Rainbow Runner Studio I picked up because, at least with the bundled Ulead MediaStudio , any unaltered MJPEG clips would play directly from the timeline; only effects / transitions / etc. required rendering. In the 1990s, that was huge; rendering took even longer than it does today, even though the video was like 720x480!) We’ve come a long way from the Iomega Buz that brought MJPEG video editing to “the masses” (it was $199, but I worked at Best Buy so got it for 5% over cost, whatever that was; $150? In the fall of 1997, so like $300 in adj...

I ran a test, recording voiceovers for videos while monitoring the audio on the Sennheiser PC38X headset I use and love at the office. As I feared, the microphone was picking up the output from the headphones - perils of an open back design (or maybe - or also? - electrical cross-talk from the shared 3.5mm TRRS cable setup). So I started looking into a solution with a good cost-performance ratio. After hearing the relatively dramatic difference between the PC38X microphone and the ModMic in this video review , I decided that was the route I’d go. Antlion had a bundle , pairing the ModMic USB (GDL-1500) with the Ultrasone 580i . The 580i headphones don’t get glowing reviews, but they’re closed-back, noise-isolating, and the combo brought the price down around $100 to about $205, so I gave ’em a shot. I like the way they sound (though I might tweak with an EQ ). For convenience, I’m routing everything to a single USB port; the headphones (3.5mm) are plugged into a Sound Blaster Play!...