High quality audio - everything you need to know for better sound in life

"People will watch anything if the audio is good" - this is a rule I stumbled across 8 years ago at a photography exhibition, listening to a National Geographic award winner discuss her documentary making and it's so true!

Disclaimer: You will read Rode and other names, none of these are affiliate links and I get no kickbacks, this is purely my best learning and suggestions to improve your auditory experience! If you want to be amazing, start listening to the worlds greatest community radio station PBS 106.7 FM and become a member :)

The quickest way to get good audio when making videos on your phone is to plug in the ear buds and use the microphone in your headset. The trick is to stick the ear buds down your neck / collar so only the microphone is outside your clothing.

The next step which we use regularly is grabbing a small condensor microphone such as the Rode VideoMic Me, or Me-L (for lighting connectors) demonstrated very well in this video;

What's in the box

To cope with a variety of situations, our travel kit includes;

• Sennheiser G3 lavalier kit x 2
• Rycote Under and Overcovers for lavalier mics (reduces wind and clothing noise)
• Rode PinMic (much better than lav microphones for going through clothing)
• Rode NTG3 shotgun microphone (excellent directional microphone)
• Rode Deadcat (yup, that's what it is called - for wind protection)
• Rode Reporter Microphone x 2
• Sennheiser G4 plug on transmitter x 2 (for Reporter Microphones)
• Rode VideoMic Pro
• Rode VideoMic Me + SmartLav + SC1 TRRS extension (for mobile phone recording)
• Sony MDR-7506 headphones x 2 (Industry standard broadcast and field headphones)

The reporter mic out of all these is exceptional for field capture, I've used it standing on gantries next to running milling and quarrying machines, out on construction sites with teams working around us, with construction vehicles blaring away in the background and high wind noise - have a listen to Shane Dunstan from Aran taking viewers through a PowerCurber which we filmed with him on-site in Brisbane.

All of this audio talk is mainly about how you capture the audio; once the filming is done, we are in the edit stage and it's time to talk about the audio master, using sophisticated software to remove background noises, repair any ‘clipping’ in the recorded audio, adjust sibilance (the hissing when people say certain words) and then go through and create a consistent audio level, through adjusting individual vocals, background effects and music.

Audio Blackmagic - Izotope RX6 Advanced

Two videos below take you through this, one focused on a little bit of editing and then removing room reverberations that is common in so many conference centres, then general environmental noise.

Making room for the voice

The mistake I hear time and time again when listening to videos is the booming music track that overwhelms the person speaking.

Sound travels in waves, when you have two competing sounds of the same frequency, their waves smash into each other and diffuse, exactly like waves breaking against each other on the beach.

The male voice peaks in the 115 Hz frequency and the female voice at 220 Hz. The simple thing to do is to go to the music track in your editing software and apply a graphic equalizer, then lowers the music at these frequency ranges.

Now your music is not destroying the spoken words of your filmed subjects - viola!

All about the bass (and treble!)

The pursuit for 'perfect' must always be tempered by the reality of experience, and a lot of the time people listening to your material will be done in environments such as noisy cafes, in trams and all other kinds of poor listening environments.

To account for the high end client boardroom through to the random sales pitch in an elevator, we do our mixing and final checks on a variety of systems, originating from an Asus Xonar Essence STX sound card, then referenced via a set of Dali 104 speakers driven by an NAD C356BEE amplifier in the studio and then a pair of DALI 400's via an NAD C372 for large scale room checks.

Generally we record stereo up to 4-5 independent channels, then mix everything down to a single channel 'mono' signal, the final tests comes from checking the YouTube uploads on an Iphone 5S with one broken speaker to really see how it will sound 'in the field' !

Improving the sound of everything you hear - DacMagic, Magnepans & Nura

Compressed audio such as mp3s means reducing the quality so you get a smaller file size. The problem is the audio is missing bits! Software physically removes bits of audio, so your songs sound tiny and flat (unless you use FLAC). What to do?!

The Cambridge Audio DacMagic Plus, an ingenious invention, takes your compressed signal, such as that from your iPhones iTunes library and fills in the gaps, in real-time, of the missing audio, then plays out a full 'uncompressed' signal to your speakers. They really are putting back the missing data.

Q. Why in the world would anyone want a 6-foot tall panel speaker?

That's the question posed on the Magnepan website and their answer is that 'you wouldn't, until you hear it' - these are heralded as the best value / highest sound quality speakers ever made - learn about Magneplanar Technology - they do a 60-day home trial with money-back guarantee for their MMG entry speakers at $650 USD a pair.

Your ears - your world of sound

Nura Headphones have recently come on the market and I haven't personally tried them - I'm a little scared I won't want to listen to anything else ever again - though I include them here as they are doing something exceptional and getting world-wide notice for it - in this case, mapping the way your ears work and then creating a personalised adjustment profile so you hear 'all' of the music as it was recorded, based on you how you personally hear things :)

Thank you for reading - if you learnt something, please give this article a like, click share and leave a comment!

Check back each Tuesday and Thursday as we move through this series on how you can transform your organisation into a story telling, profit-generating machine!

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Part 1 - How we bake your cake at Bravo Charlie - Initial Gap Analysis

Part 2 - Culture Design Day #1 - Exploration

Part 3 - Researching, Developing and Delivering Your Digital Systems and Marketing Strategy

Part 4 - Customer and Stakeholder Interviews, Competitor and Market Research

Part 5 - Photography - Do you know a good image?

Part 6 - Initial Filming of Staff, Facilities and Customers

Part 7 - How To Leverage Your proud customers

Part 8 - How long does filming take?

Part 9 - Editing; Where the magic happens

Part 10 - Colour Grading - Shaping Emotion & Controlling Communication

Part 11 - High quality audio - everything you need to know for better sound in life

Part 12 - The need for captions in modern delivery

Part 13 - Music, language of the soul

Part 14 - Implementing your New Sales Machine

Part 15 - Making an event out of your launch and generating twice your outlay in sales

Part 16 - How to turn your team into content creators - Culture Design Day #2

Part 17 - How to Achieve High Quality Regular Content Production that Drives Sales

Part 18 - Your total time commitment to go through a Digital Transformation

Part 19 - Translations and a global focus

Part 20 - Efficient Workflows - The Keys To The Content Castle

Part 21 - Turning Your Knowledge Into Sales Tools