Pod Sounds
One of the problems with podcasting (something I am VERY in favor of, in general) is that since it’s usually produced by amateurs with inexpensive equipment, the sound quality is frequently bad. It’s not something you notice a lot of the time because they’re talking, not making music, but if you are trying to listen in circumstances where fidelity is otherwise affected, you’ll pick up on it.
For example, I enjoy listening to podcasts when I mow the lawn. It makes the time fairly fly by, I really enjoy it. The podcast I’m most likely to listen to is “The BS Report,” by the inimitable Bill Simmons; he produces 2-4 of them a week, averaging 45 minutes, and since it takes me about 45 minutes to mow my lawn, it’s ideal. The problem is, I’m walking behind what is essentially an unmuffled internal combustion engine. It’s loud. Even with headphones on, I often have to turn the volume on the podcast all the way up. It’s probably not good for my ears, but I justify it by saying my eardrums have already stiffened to protect themselves from the noise of the lawnmower. (Didn’t know they did that, did you? They do. When faced with a barrage of noise, your ears will adjust to prevent damage. It’s why someone surprising you by yelling in your ear hurts, but someone yelling in your ear to be heard over top of a Justin Timberlake concert is fine.)
The problem comes in the fact that whoever is in charge of mixing Bill’s podcasts down sets the EQ such that sibilants, specifically S, are insanely loud. This is not something that’s difficult to fix, even if Bill is using a headset to record instead of, say, a quality microphone with a pop filter. Just pull down a specific frequency, and boom. Done.
Another of my favorite podcasts, “On The DL with Dan Levy,” suffers from a bizarre growl problem. Dan always sounds a bit like a chainsaw. The worst, however, is “Real Time with Bill Maher,” a podcast made from the regular HBO show. There, the problems aren’t EQ, but levels: Bill is always audible, but frequently his guests are not, and invariably the ambient mics they set up to get audience reactions are ear-blowing loud. Not just when I’ve the volume cranked to hear over my lawnmower, but also when I’m in my car, aka the most common place that people listen to podcasts. This is just laziness, really.
Excuses abound: Bill Maher’s techs are undoubtedly setting the fidelity for TV broadcast, not podcasting; the others are limited by the settings they use to try and get the size of the podcast under 10MB, the limit imposed by Apple and AT&T for downloading items over the 3G network.
Bull.
First of all, most of these podcasts aren’t under 10MB. Simmons has actually split some longer podcasts in two, supposedly to get under the limit, and they’re still 15MB chunks that I can’t enjoy until I go somewhere that has a wifi connection for my phone to access. The Bill Maher podcasts are routinely 15MB.
Second: somehow, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow‘s podcasts of their live MSNBC shows (each about 45 minutes long) somehow manage to get quality EQ and proper levelling of mics for hosts and guests, achieve a decent audio fidelity (no scratchiness), get the filesizes at around 9.8MB, and have them online by the morning after (unlike Bill Maher’s show, which is on 4 days later at the earliest, and often goes weeks without posting anything and then throws 3 or 4 shows up at once).
Sure, Maddow and Olbermann have quality recording equipment and professional engineers on staff to handle it, but I guarantee Maher does as well. And as a further counterpoint, James Lileks’s “Diner” podcasts always had fantastic sound, with what I assume to be a “prosumer”-level setup run by the journalist himself. (Lileks’s biggest problem at the moment is that, if he’s still doing diners [he may have stopped when he got busy being the all-media journalist for the Star-Tribune], they aren’t available on iTunes, and haven’t been for years.)
C’mon, guys, put a little effort into your podcasts. None of them need to be longer than 45 minutes, the perfect size to get a nicely adjusted recording under 10MB. Get on it.
