Podcasts have poor balance between spoken portions and musical extracts.
Tue, Apr 23 2013, 11:00PM
I recently listened to the Gramophone podcast titled 'Conductor John Wilson on Elgar ...', dated Jan. 4. 2013. I nearly jumped out of my skin when musical extracts were mixed in at sound levels wildly disproportionate to those of the spoken portions. The incompetence of the mix was so astounding, that I wondered if any of the editorial staff is reviewing these before they are released. I am talking about levels that could blow out a driver on someone's home system or the eardrums of those listening with earphones.
Is anyone minding the podcast store?
Wed, Apr 24 2013, 1:05PM
#2
RE: Podcasts have poor balance between spoken portions and
Hello,
Many thanks for your feedback, which is very helpful. We do, of course, listen to the Podcasts before publishing them. A perfect balance is much easier to achieve when the interview was conducted in a studio, but sometimes - as with John Wilson - it is done in a public space, and it's not always easy to achieve as high quality sound as we would like. But as I say, very useful feedback which we will take into account.
Martin
Fri, Apr 26 2013, 2:13AM
#3
RE: Podcasts have poor balance between spoken portions and
Thanks for your comment, Martin!
When I spoke of "balance" I meant also simply "volume". Take the interview with John-Eliot Gardiner in a recent podcast - his voice (recorded indoors) was very silent, the music exerpts very loud.
I generally find the voice on your podcasts far too silent, I can hardly hear it, while you then insert music that's much louder in comparison. So, all you need to do is increase the voice volume on the podcast and make it more similar to the volume spectrum of any music exerpts. I constantly have to turn up the volume to hear the voice, then turn down when the music comes, then up again and down and so on. No other podcast I listen to has this problem.
Thanks for your consideration!
Fri, Apr 26 2013, 12:45PM
#4
RE: Podcasts have poor balance between spoken portions and
And thank you for your feedback - I shall pay particuar attention to this aspect with future podcasts.
Martin
I couldn't agree more. I noticed the same in the recent Podcast with John Eliot Gardiner. The spoken word (interview) was very silent, the music very loud. I always found spoken word in the Gramophone podcasts to be of particularly bad quality, too low in volume and also with too much echo of the room, it sounds like amateurs put this together. The sound level aspect is the more important, and it's very easy to fix. I hope they do!
Thanks for bringing it up, it annoys me very much with these podcasts.