Be Aware: Why People Turn Off Your Podcast Due to Audio Issues

Why exactly do listeners get frustrated with bad sounding audio and angrily turn off the offending podcast? Because it makes listeners do work instead of simply enjoying the content!

Here are the audio issues that annoy listeners the most:

• One or more participants sound very distant and difficult to understand. This happens because their microphone is not close enough to their mouth and/or their recording space is ultra-reverberant.
• One or more participants is making annoying extraneous sounds like banging on their desk, clicking a pen, tapping their foot, moving their microphone around unnecessarily, rearranging their desk mid-interview, etc.
• One or more participants is drifting on- and off-mic, which means at times they are loud as hell (very close to their mic) and other times they are dreadfully quiet (very far from their mic). These folks need to learn good mic technique, or use significant compression in post-production.
• Some participants audio is mixed way louder or way softer than others. This causes the listener to “ride their volume knob”, which means constantly alternating between turning down the loud person and turning up the quiet person.
• Intro/outro music is WAY TOO LOUD and the listener gets blasted with loud volume, causing them to “ride their volume knob” (see definition just above).
• One or more participants has nasty jarring plosives.
• One or more participants has nasty irritating sibilance.
• One or more participants has significantly loud background noise like air ducts, air conditioners, the road outside the window, family members in the next room, the computer fan, etc.

Did I miss any?

Have you ever turned off a podcast due to horrible sound? Comment below!

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