Be Aware: Using Echo-Cancellation Degrades Audio Quality

Many online recording services (Squadcast, Zencastr, Riverside.fm, etc.) have a feature called echo-cancellation which users should enabled if/when any participants are NOT wearing headphones. Without this kind of echo-cancellation you will hear participants voices echoing back and forth which makes a conversation virtually impossible. And unfortunately with echo-cancellation enabled there are ducking/muting issues when people talk over each other, which is very annoying and literally disrupts the conversation. But, if someone doesn’t have earbuds or headphones you are FORCED to use echo-cancellation.

In a recent episode I produced for a client I clearly noticed the audio degradation caused by the echo-cancellation. This was the first time we had to use echo-cancellation with this particular client and afterwards I noticed that the recordings sounded quite a bit worse than usual. In previous episodes (without echo-cancellation) the host sounded very clear, but in this episode (with echo-cancellation) he sounded quite midrangy, dull and not very clear in the high frequencies.

I compensated for those deficiencies in post-production but of course you can never make a bad sounding recording sound AS good as a high quality recording.

What about you — have you noticed this type of audio quality degradation?

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