Why Sound Quality Really Matters In Podcasting?

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard, your host for today. And today I want to talk about does your sound quality really matter? As podcasters, we all are putting out an audio show. Now some of us are putting out a video show as well, but all of us are putting out an audio show. And I want to talk about does sound quality really matter? And it is a question. There's a spectrum of audio quality and there are different considerations. But I'm here to tell you absolutely your sound quality matters. But that doesn't mean we have to go spending thousands of dollars on equipment. It doesn't mean we have to have a dedicated studio. What I want to talk to you about, you know, all the considerations around audio quality and does it really matter? So one of the things I want to share that helps frame this a little bit is there actually has been some scientific research done on this subject. And there is an article which is going to be shared with you in the chat, those of you that are live here. And for those of you listening to the podcast, go to the blog post@politize.com and for the blog post for this episode and you will have a link to this article if you want to check it out. But there was a research study done by USC and also a university in Australia. I think it's Australia National University. They really did some studies and they took, you know, they actually took video programming and, you know, put it in front of a hundred people. And this was statistically significant. And when it had really good audio quality, the message was understood. And that more importantly, what was being shared with them was believed more by the people watching. And when they altered the audio quality to reduce that audio quality and make it, you know, less than what it should be, something not the best audio quality. It's amazing. As soon as they reduce the audio quality, all of a sudden the scientists and their research for what was being presented lost credibility. People didn't believe the research, the science that was being presented, and it was no different than what was presented with better audio quality. But when it had poor audio Quality, people didn't believe it. That is so important to understand and to really believe about your audio quality. And this is just one research. It's actually the research was done a couple years ago at usc and I keep this article. I have it on hand. I share it with people a lot because it hasn't changed today, even though it's a few years later. But that article, if you want to see it, is in the blog post@poditize.com for this feed you'd brand episode. And it's so important. And just as I've always believed it, I've always said it, I've always told the people we work with that the audio quality matters. But having that actual research study and the results speak for themselves is so important to understand. And I think it sort of puts an exclamation point on what I'm here to share with you today in this episode.

But there are certainly a range of opinions, even understanding audio quality is important and that you know, when you are bringing your message to the world, you want message sent from you to be message received by your listeners. Right? And audio quality impacts that. And my message might not be received as well as you want it to be if your audio quality is poor, but there is still a range of acceptable audio quality and there are choices to be made. I often meet people that came from sort of old school radio experiences and they're like, no, no, you got to have a soundproof room. You got to have a $600 microphone that is plugged into a serious engineering system with equalization and all sorts of stuff, or it's not worth doing. And that's a really limited situation that most podcasters either don't want to take the time to go out to a studio, pay for the time to use the studio with an engineer who's there mixing and saving your stuff all the time, or simply can't afford it. It's not practical. But for those people that either want to go to the time and effort to set up a dedicated studio, make it as soundproof as possible, that's awesome. More power to you go for it and do it. But you know, do you really need to have thousands of dollars of equipment? In my experience, I'm going to say absolutely not. And I am someone that, for my very first podcast, went out and, you know, did the research and bought, I think it was 12 or $1,500 worth of equipment. And I used it for many years. I got value out of it, but later came to realize, well, software's improved a lot over the years of my podcasting. The microphones have improved that are while they could be plugged into a mixing board and a sound system can also plug in through USB to to your computer and do just as good a job. And is it really necessary to have this more expensive equipment? And then I went on to do a study myself of a lot of different microphones I did for a feed your brand episode that aired a couple years ago, and it's still relevant today. And I'm going to have the link to that one also within the blog post for this episode@poditize.com so you can check that out. I tested every microphone that anybody would consider using and actually recorded live, unedited clips of recording on each one, pros and cons of each, price ranges of each. So you can check that out. And what I really found is, you know, what an $80 microphone is my go to and I'm using right now, and it's plugged into my computer via usb. So you don't have to have incredibly expensive equipment to produce good sound quality either, really. If now there are environmental conditions that can impact this and make it so that it's really hard to use an inexpensive microphone. So I'm going to give you an example. You know, if you're recording at home, you may have, you know, a very quiet room most of the time. And, you know, I was recording episodes every single day at my home, but if I recorded on Wednesdays, I had to watch it. I eventually stopped recording on Wednesdays. I certainly didn't schedule any guest interviews on Wednesdays because Wednesday was trash day. And as wonderful as my environment was, if that trash truck. And of course, there were three trash trucks that would come on Wednesday, one to pick up trash, one to pick up recycling, one to pick up green waste. So you'd have three trucks that are coming and dumping. Do you imagine these recycle cans full of bottles and all sorts of glass and I mean, it makes a racke and it's distracting to me. And it also could be heard over the podcast because where I live, it's, you know, it comes pretty close to the building, in fact, the room I'm recording. And even though the windows are shut and there's drapes across it, you can still hear it. So environmental conditions play a role in this. Same thing with like doorbell for your house, right? I mean, I ended up getting to the point where I disconnected the doorbell because, damn it, every time I would be having a great interview with a guest Somebody would, you know, FedEx or somebody would ring the D.O. doorbell. I was like, forget it. I don't want to answer the door anymore. You can leave me a note on the door or leave whatever it is. I'm focusing on podcasting. That's more important to me. But understanding you've got things like this that are outside factors that you know, you want to make sure you control and you prepare for. That can impact your audio quality too. But returning to sort of the spectrum of sound quality, talked about radio DJ situation where you might be in a soundproof studio, very expensive professional equipment. Wonderful if you can do that. Most, you know, homes or home offices where a lot of podcasters are recording along as the environment is decent, carpet on the floor, soft surfaces, you hopefully won't get too much echo. And if you do, you need to fix that and either move to a different environment or change that environment to be more sound absorbing, more friendly to sound and reduce echo. And then a USB mic in your computer is perfectly good for the vast majority of podcasts. But then the other end of the spectrum, from, remember we had the radio DJ to the computer and USB mic, you've got a lot of people who are just doing live streams from their phone out in the world and using nothing more than the microphone built into their phone. That is not going to be the best quality audio for sure out of any of these scenarios. That's going to be the worst. Now, there are microphones you can plug into your phone. Actually, when I use my phone for something I do, I plug in the the same microphone. I'm talking to you now with a cord right into the phone. The phone recognizes it and we'll use it for most apps. Little caveat there. You want to check on that most apps, so test it. But you can also, there's a lot of mics that will just plug right into the bottom of your iPhone or your Samsung phone and give you a higher quality microphone. But still, if you're live streaming somewhere from the trade show floor or for, you know, maybe out at any kind of event, you're gonna have a lot of background noise and that audio quality is not gonna be up to your normal podcast standard. It may still be worth using a clip of that, if not all of it. But people tend to put things like this out on social media live streams, and then they, you know, repurpose it as a podcast. Is that always a good idea? I mean, if the content is really good, I think, and you already have an established show, it's worth Providing that content, even though the audio quality would not be up to your normal standard. But I would record a little intro at the beginning, sort of addressing the elephant in the room, letting your listeners know, hey, welcome to the show. You know what? Today I'm going to share with you a live stream recording I did out in the field. You're going to hear some background noise and I know that's not ideal, but the content's really worth it. So, you know, I hope you'll forgive it and benefit from the message, which is worth hearing. And, you know, if you frame it that way, they'll be just fine with listening to it. But it's not every episode. If you're going to annoy people, every episode with poor audio quality, people are going to switch away and come back and you'll lose credibility. You know, it's the weight of your message that that USC study proved or proves, or at least, well, I think proves you can decide for yourself that, you know, audio quality has a big impact on the message, you know, being received the way you want it to.

I'm going to share with you one of my pet peeves, okay. Drives me nuts. And this has happened in the last two years from recording this starting, you know, early to mid-2020 as we were all on lockdowns during the pandemic, you know, and we're all probably watching too much TV at that point and other things because we're not getting out. Well, you watch any news program, especially on all the 24 hour news networks, I don't care if it's you're watching Fox or CNN or, you know, msnbc, whatever, it doesn't matter. Any of them. They all were trying to fill their 24 hour news cycles with all kinds of correspondents and, or contributors, people that are no longer able to come into a studio. And usually they might have a panel of people right there around the table. Well, they weren't doing that, keeping everybody at home isolated. You had maybe if you're lucky, one person in the studio, but a lot of times there were none. And you have all these other people contributing and you have the boxes on the screens not all that different from like a zoom call. And they're all using whatever equipment they had. And what would drive me nuts is you have correspondents or contributors who are on regularly, they're coming on every day and they couldn't take the time to buy from Amazon a darn $80 mic prime and get it home and plug it into their computer. So they've got good Quality audio. They're using just that dumb little microphone plugged into their or that's built into their laptop and that's it. Or the worst, which really drives me nuts is using the AirPods. Well, you can hear perfectly good with those. The mic quality on them is lousy. And we always recommend to our podcasters, do not use AirPods as your microphone. There's a few reasons why. Number one, they have rechargeable batteries and when they run out in the middle of an interview, then you're stuck and you gotta change and it's unprofessional and you got tech problems now. So there's a lot of reasons not to use AirPods. But just talking about sound quality, the audio quality is lousy. And when you ever see somebody, one of those correspondents doing it on a news program, a lot of them use those AirPods and boy, I hate listening to it. And it makes me switch off. I'm just like, forget it, I'm not. If you don't care enough about your audio and the message you're trying to bring to, you know, and you do it regularly, it's a little different when they're interviewing someone on the street, somebody who's not really on, you know, although they usually have a mic they hand to them. But if you have somebody who's not a regular participant, you can understand. Maybe they don't have a decent audio quality, but oftentimes I hear a one time participant with much better audio than one of these regular contributors who's being paid by this network to be on the show every day. Big pet peeve if you can't tell. I know I'm ranting a little bit here. So here's what I want everyone to understand and consider. You know, aside from me talking about the sort of spectrum of sound quality, you know, you may be thinking, well, what should I do? You know, where, where should you know if I'm. I like live streaming and repurposing that. Should I do it? Well, yeah, I think you should. But here's what I have to say about figuring out what's best for you. You've got to strike a balance. I think all of us who are podcasting regularly should be striving for the best quality audio possible because we want our message to be received, we want it to be trusted, we want people to believe what we're saying. So the better audio quality, the better it's going to be in terms of achieving that goal. But there's a balance to be struck. If you are Not a highly technical person because we have, we experience people at all ends of this spectrum. And, you know, I'll use my sister as an example who's starting a podcast and she was getting used to, you know, she's going to use Zoom to do her recordings and she's like, hey, the microphone that I have, I mean, it's. I did this session and I recorded it and there's no sound on it. It was like, there's no sound at all. She's like, yeah, there's no sound at all. I get on a tech call with her and figure out she was not used to using Zoom very much. And Zoom comes up and says, join with computer audio or test your equipment. She was hitting the test your equipment. She wasn't joining the Zoom. Her own Zoom meeting with her computer equipment. I mean, this is a tech issue, tech challenge. Nothing wrong with the mic, but she just was hitting the wrong button. So my point is, if you are someone that is not as tech savvy or you just, you get frustrated with it, maybe you just don't want to deal with, then radio dedicated audio studio model is not going to be for you because the equipment is more complicated to set up. It's more complicated to connect with a computer. If you're going to use a computer for remotely connecting with someone and, you know, you might with that kind of equipment need to be recording, not with the computer, with a separate recording device. You're talking about a pretty high bar of tech in order to record. Whereas plugging a USB mic into a computer using a tool like Zoom, which for most people is not such a challenge where you're going to send somebody a single link, they click and get into it. Now, there are other recording programs in Zoom, like a Riverside or a Squad Cast or something like that that also gives you a single link. And I'm nothing wrong with any of those programs. But my point is, use what's easiest for you and easiest for your guest, if you have guests, to get the best audio quality possible. So best audio quality possible within reason. But balance ease of use and user experience with sound quality and achieve really the best audio quality that you can. And you know, it doesn't take a microphone with hundreds of dollars. It doesn't take spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on an environment. I mean, home environments can be just fine. But just be aware of your environment. And by the way, test, test, test, test, record, listen to yourself. And don't just listen to what you're saying, listen to what you're not Saying, listen to that background noise. Is there any, Is there white noise there, there? You know, you can test and say, hey, you know what, while I'm recording, can you go in and out the front door and shut it? I want to see if I can hear that on my microphone and you know, ring the doorbell. I want to see what's that raw thing going to be? Is it that big a deal? Do I have to worry about it or record something? If you've got trash trucks coming by or something equivalent, record while that's happening and see if you can hear it. Just don't have it. Be unintentional and try to reduce the amount of unexpected things that might happen to make your audio quality the best that it can be. And you're going to be doing. If you're not editing your own stuff, you're going to be doing your audio editors a favor and helping them do a better job for you. And if you're editing your own stuff, you're going to save yourself a lot of time in trying to deal with it and fix it when something happens like that.

So does your sound quality really matter? Absolutely it does. That's the overall message. But don't necessarily jump through all kinds of hoops thinking you have to be like a radio DJ and spend that kind of money and deal with that kind of tech. There is a solution that's going to be the right balance for you of audio quality versus audio quality and ease of use and tech. And you know, anybody can do it. Like I said, I no longer use that $1500 worth of equipment. I've got an $80 USB mic plugged into my laptop and my environment is prepared. Yes. It's not got a lot of echo and that's fine. And that's it. I mean, a zoom recording. Yeah, I could record a higher quality audio. I just don't need to. And my message? Well, you tell me. If you have an issue with my audio quality, I'd love to hear it. But the other thing actually talking about those circumstances, any animals, barking dogs, things like that, not professional. Fortunately, my dog is sleeping at my feet right now. But believe me, if she heard something, she would wake up and bark and ruin part of this recording. So either expect it, deal with it when it happens, or prepare ahead of time. And I think I got lucky with this recording. So there you go. Thanks so much. I hope you find this helpful. Don't forget to go to the blog post apollitize.com where you can get a couple of those links to what I mentioned and next time we'll have another great topic for you. Hopefully Tracy and I will both be here or another member of our team. Always trying to provide you value and we'd love to hear from you what you would like to hear in future episodes. You can always reach us.

There's a form there, there's some emails. Feel free or anywhere on social media. FeedYourBrand thanks so much everybody.

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