Yeah, they managed to make it louder, but that also made the hiss louder. The signal to noise ratio should be much better than it is. There's definitely something wrong with the setup.
So, I finally solved this problem...
The FetHeads need to be placed immediately at the output of the mic, not at the mixer ! D'OH! I should have realized that, but didn't read enough about it at the time. Low-noise amps always go as close to the source as possible. I knew this, but didn't apply it to audio mixing.
![Confounded face :confounded: 😖](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f616.png)
I also found a page on Shure's site where they explain quite clearly that the SMB7 needs ~60dB of gain, which is a lot... and which our mixer provides, but it's a Behringer so at close to 60dB (the max), it's quite noisy. Not sure why the SMB7 itself doesn't come with a note to that effect, but oh well.
So now each mic has 27dB of gain from the FetHead, and about 30dB of gain on the mixer. At 62dB total gain (27 FetHead + 35 mixer), there is the typical "too much gain echo", so I turned them down a bit today. We're also now using both the compander on the mixer channels and the compander and noise gate in Xsplit.
The result is the best audio we've had yet! And it only took 2 years and reading countless Reddit and forum posts.
![Zany face :zany_face: 🤪](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f92a.png)