Podcast Audio Quality

The quality of some podcast audio is dreadful, there’s no need for that to be the case since the equipment needed is good quality and reasonably priced.

Things to do and to avoid.
1. Don’t use the built in microphone of your laptop computer, the reason for this is that although it might be of good quality it will pick up computer fan and hard drive noise and it limits you as to where you can put the microphone and still operate your computer effectively. Buy a recording microphone that you can plug into the computer and put in the best place.

If you have enough space in the room where you’re doing the recording use a microphone stand so that you don’t get handling noise on the microphone.
 
Buy a separate windshield that you can put a few inches infront of the microphone (the built in windshields rarely get rid of the worst blasts of air). If you do have such artefacts then using some extreme bass cut just at those points in your software audio editor can help to make them less objectionable, but it’s best to avoid the problem in the first place.

Record in a quiet room and avoid places that have a 'lively' acoustic - use a carpeted room with plenty of soft furnishings or hang up some duvets to soak up the reflectiveness of the room. If this isn’t possible then get close to the microphone and speak quietly into it (this reduces the room adding reverberation) also make sure you’ve used a windshield.

If you’re recording yourself use headphones to monitor yourself and turn down any speakers. Use a directional microphone and have it backed off from the computer to avoid cooling fan and hard-drive noises. You can only monitor with speakers if you’re recording someone else who’s located in another acoustically isolated room.

If you’re reading from a script then it would be a good idea to buy a music stand to put it on, this avoids paper rustling.

Set your recording level so that it goes into the red area only occasionally and avoid it being too quiet too.

If you are using a compressor/limiter in your pre-amplifier avoid excessive reduction of the dynamic range. Use low compression ratios on the compressor and set the limiter at a high threshold just to prevent the loudest parts of your recording from distorting.

Use the eq built into your sound editor after recording, when you can make a better judgement of sound quality, this is because you will hear yourself as others hear you when playing back the recording.

Microphone Choice
There are no hard and fast rules about podcasting microphones since the frequency response of the human voice isn’t that great and you’re putting the microphone close to the person who’s speaking, so there are no frequency response or noise issues to worry about. The only thing to consider is getting a cardioid mic to avoid unwanted noise of the computer, but if you have a quiet room and you’re recording several people around one microphone then an omni mic would be better. The USB microphones that are now available will remove the need for a separate preamplifier but some will not have any means of direct monitoring built into them so you will hear a slight delay when monitoring via the computer.

Posted in Technology on Sunday 12th of October 2008 07:32:55 PM