The Only Time When Audio Quality Affects Audience Size

If your podcast audio is annoying and difficult to hear and understand, your audience size will be less than what it should be because MANY listeners will simply turn off your podcast due to the horrible listening experience.

Does that mean you need world-class audio quality? No. All you need is “good enough” audio quality.

Here are the things to avoid or fix to ensure your audio is “good enough”:

• 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 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.
• 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 way louder or way quieter 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 being WAY TOO LOUD and the listener gets blasted with loud volume, causing them to “ride their volume knob” (see definition just above).

In summary, the only time audio quality affects audience size is when the audio is terrible, annoying and difficult to listen to.

What are your thoughts? Comment below.

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