I know that it was mentioned somewhere on the Internet, but personally I completely missed any mention of this feature. Found out today by plugging a cellphone-targeted microphone into the output jack on a whim. It works! This means I can use OP-1 as a USB audio interface for some tutorial videos I’m recording. (I do have a real audio interface, but it takes up space and picks up a lot of EM interference.)
Edit: Can anyone recommend a headset with a good microphone? My cheap Miracle Sound lapel mic is better than its price would suggest and good enough for amateur recordings, but I wouldn’t mind paying for something of a higher tier. (I’ve also tried my Logitec gaming headset and it sounds absolutely awful.)
maybe the teenage m-1? i don’t use it for music production, but i use it for phone calls and zoom meetings all the time. in fact, i purchased a bunch of these for folks i work with during the pandemic to use for online meetings as well.
i suppose in a pinch you could use them for production if you want, or in a hotel room. they are surprisingly well built for such a dainty headphone. i’m pretty sure the m-1 was a collaboration with aiaiai. ← similar design aesthetic/build quality. i could be wrong about that though.
OP-1 Field works surprisingly well as an audio interface for recording voice. I’m using using 15 for microphone sensitivity, cranking red param on the tape all the way up and adding 5 points of drive. This allows me to make my voice loud enough so that I don’t need to mess around with post-processing. I’ve also tweaked master equalizer to offset the deficiencies of the lapel microphone I use. The built-in level monitor does its job. Microphone button allows me to mute easily. I like this compact setup way better than running a full-blown audio interface and big microphone.
(I can also apply 2nd FX to my voice via vocoder engine and play samples or tape if I ever get into recording something more creative.)
This again makes me wish there was a “podcast” tape mode where instead of 4 stereo tracks we got one mono track 8 times longer. 6 min * 8 = 48 minutes. Slowing down tape to 50% we could stretch that to 96 minutes with some loss of quality, which is fairly respectable.
Bought V-MODA BoomPro microphone for my Logitech headset. Pretty good for the price ($20-25). Very good ambient noise control, i.e. no “echo” from the voice is heard. Clever design too, since you can use it with most microphones that have a detachable 3.5mm cable.
the microphone is surprisingly good and i hadn’t thought of using it directly as a computer microphone before reading this. so i hooked it up to a mac over usb-c and configured it as the system input. playing notes on the synth came through the computer, and so did even the FM radio, but i wasn’t able to get the OP-1f mic to go to the computer. i checked levels pretty carefully. anyone seen this?
Yes, there is something different about routing of the internal microphone. Maybe it’s because they are rightfully afraid of feedback loops. Internal microphone sound does not get routed via USB unless you’re using Vocoder engine. You can set vocoder to the lowest possible red setting and crank the patch volume to 100% to get full amplitude. This also allows you to route your voice (or sounds) through the additional effect in case you want to get creative.
The built-in microphone on OP-1 Field is pretty good. Way, way better than than the one on OP-1. The input AD converters on OP-1 F also seem to be of much higher quality than in run-of-the-mill PC sound cards.
When I use the headset, it records a kind of low-volume buzzing noise. It’s quiet enough to be unnoticeable if the recording is a bit under-amplified, but it gets pretty annoying if I boost the volume:
(This is a short WAV file, I’m to lazy to upload it anywhere else. Just change the extension to .wav if you want to hear it.)
This does not happen via internal microphone. This does not happen with a crappy cellphone TRRS microphone I have (or maybe it’s so noisy that it masks the buzzing). The weirdest thing is that this noise stops if I mute the headset microphone using the control box on the wire. This indicates that the buzzing doesn’t come from OP-1 itself.
Somehow the microphone picks up interference. But it only picks it up when plugged into OP-1 Field. I bought a TRRS to TRS adapter and tested it with DR-O5. No buzzing. I am confounded.