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At last Summers Conclave in Minneapolis on the Adult Alternative panel we were able to have Ian Paige from band Barenaked Ladies in our discussion group. One topic Ian brought up was the constant slide he’s seen in sound quality in all media outside of TV and Movie audio. Ian’s descriptions of being in a very expensive studio with all the best audio components and systems only to ‘dumb down’ the final mix to a single 5 inch speaker showed the frustrations producers and musicians experience. Ian refused to mix it down to that level in his work, but you can hear very quickly that many artists and a lot of our standards in radio are mixing down to the lowest level of reproduction.
Perhaps much of it stems from today’s listening environment. More and more music is in a digital and very compact world where speakers have been shrunk to the point where they can’t reproduce the range of sound we had in the 70s or 80s when you dealt with speakers built on 10 inch and 12 inch platforms. For a while the sub-woofer filled the bill, but outside of the surround sound systems (and many don’t have an AM/FM tuner) and car audio (including the large scale ‘Fosgate’ style rap music set ups), we don’t see much beyond fairly small speakers and amplifiers. In fact most people have a much better audio set up in their vehicle than they have at home or in any of their portable systems.
The I-Pod /MP3 world is driven by the small ear-buds and very compact 3-5 inch speaker add on boxes. The input levels are not standardized so many units have overloaded the first stages in the amplifier section in the new portable world. Look at your computer, in my case a laptop, with speakers I can’t even find or small 2-3 inch systems. While it’s fine to announce ‘you got mail’ and play the windows music at sign on – listening to streaming audio, songs I’ve downloaded, or other audio on my hard drive is low quality reproduction. Now we have music and audio moving to the cell phone, what will that mean – sound so bad you’ll want to hang up?
Too bad that we finally have a platform with digital music to transport thousands of songs in our shirt pocket, the ability to download music directly to our computers/devices, and access to thousands of radio stations/programs via streaming. The whole system is far more capable of delivering a full range of audio quality – superior to the tape and vinyl systems we used with the superior audio systems of the past. Yet much of the experience is limited by the final stage a cheap overloaded amplifier and tiny speakers.
Even though there are still high quality audio amplifiers and speaker systems out there the overall quality of audio has gone down a lot in the last 20 years. Portability has taken center stage, but now with systems down to credit card size higher quality must be lurking as the next stage of improvement.
These realities are important to radio right now. In some ways our audio quality control has also fallen down in the last 20 years. Yes we have new digital systems in STLs, transmitters, control boards and audio processing, but look/listen to all the audio in your system and I bet you’ll find many songs, spots, imaging and other audio that’s distorted. Many have also lost any ‘level standard’ in the system forcing the processing to huff and puff to make it audible.
Even though we often listen on small portable radios in hotel rooms with bad reception you can hear the problems. Songs dubbed in with overloaded levels, imaging with bad edit/cue points, mix settings in the digital system that cause bad segues and live breaks (or voice tracks) that are so poorly mixed that you can’t understand what’s said or where the music drops out completely under the announcer.
When you are looking over your systems, go beyond the audio processing. We often seem obsessed with tweaking the compression and limiting. It’s still important and you should be listening to both a good quality car audio system and a smaller system with the settings set to deliver as good a quality product on both. Yes, you will have compromises but the new systems can deliver good quality on both if you have them set right for the kind of music you play.
The larger issues lurk in the whole audio system. Take care in every mix down on your sweepers and promos. Make sure the jocks know how to mix the sound and execute voice tracks to insure that both high and lower quality audio systems have a quality mix. Watch the levels and set precise standards in all your digital audio content, this is especially important with the music. Surely your engineer and the digital studio supplier have procedures here to assure a quality product – is everyone who places audio on the system aware of the procedures and settings?
While you might be able to get away with mediocre audio quality now it won’t last for long. As we begin to sell the advantages of HD radio we will need to start to sell the audience on a higher quality level of sound. You’ve seen it happen in TV as the new sets are more likely to be hooked up to surround systems or even have much higher quality audio systems in them than just a few years ago. Soon the ‘development curve’ on portability will be past that point where the new innovations are meaningful and we will turn to advantages centered around sound quality. We can either lead the way or be buried as a lower quality product. Remember that your audio quality is only as good as its weakest link or source. If you start cleaning up what you have and set standards with the whole team to make sure your delivering your best it will pay off.
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