I was listening to the RayWenderlich.com Podcast yesterday, a great podcast about coding apps, and the hosts were chatting about their brand new audio equipment. Hosts Mic and Jake had been gathering feedback from listeners about how to improve their podcast, and one thing they kept hearing was basically: “Great show! Sound quality could be better!” So, they grabbed new mics, pop filters, acoustic foam—all that good stuff—and recorded their first episode of the new season. Big improvement.

Jake (who does the editing) went on to ask listeners what they thought of the new sound—and for any tips on how to improve it further. Making recorded voices sound great is a fantastic challenge. We can use all sorts of tricks to do this, like compression, reverb, and of course EQ. So, given that we’ve been talking so much about EQ lately, this seemed like a perfect blog topic. This week, we’ll see if we can improve the sound quality of these gentlemen’s podcast by giving them the equalizer (EQ) treatment.

The Plan

Here’s what we’re going to do: we’ll take a listen to sections of the podcast that feature Mic’s voice and that feature Jake’s voice, identify any problem areas, and then do our best to improve them. This is a terrific opportunity to put the lessons from our Audio Primer and EQing tutorial to use. Now before we get started, let’s clear up some potential confusion:

• “Mic” (pronounced “mick”) is the host of the show. He is a person with a life, dreams, and interests.
• The other “mic” (pronounced “mike”) is short for microphone. It is a tool to record audio. (As far as we know, it has neither life, dreams, nor interests.)

With that out of the way, let’s get started!

1. Listen to the tracks

Here’s what Mic and Jake’s voices sound like straight from the podcast recording. I’ve grouped the two hosts together so you can hear how they sound one after the other. Mic’s up first.

Not bad, right?

2. Identify the problems

To be honest, the tracks are pretty good… but I think we can make them even better. Listening to Mic, and then Jake, and then Mic again, I’m hearing a lot more warmth and low-end in Mic’s track, but perhaps it’s a little boomy and “thick.” This could be for a variety of reasons: maybe he’s closer to the mic (i.e., “proximity effect”), he’s using a different mic, or some other reason. Compared to Mic, Jake’s track sounds a bit more “boxy.” It’s missing some of that warmth.

Enter our favourite tool for EQ education: HearEQ. After some fiddling around, it looks like we can deal with the thickness of Mic’s track by bringing down the lows (250 Hz). In the short video below, we’re going to slowly roll in the effect with HearEQ and then turn it on and off so you can hear the difference. Take a listen:

Turning down the lows in Mic’s track boosts the clarity and lightens it up. For Jake’s track, we can reduce that boxiness be reducing the mids (around 1000 Hz). Again, we’ll steadily roll in the effect and then toggle it on and off.

3. Apply the filters

Using HearEQ, it was pretty easy to hone in on the EQ changes we needed. After some experimenting, I found that the following EQ changes were helpful:

• –3 dB at 340 Hz for Mic
• –4 dB at 750 Hz and +2 dB at 6.6 kHz for Jake

To reduce echo on the tracks, we also added a highpass filter at 50 Hz for both. Finally, we added a touch of reverb to Jake’s track and things were sounding pretty good. Applying these effects in Reaper and exporting (here’s a tutorial), we get some great before-and-after samples.

Before (same as above)

After

The End

And there we have it: a few simple EQ changes can make a pretty big difference! We mostly just focussed on EQ here, but there are many factors that contribute to sound quality. Personal preference is one of them! What’s yours? We’d love to hear what you think. Also, if you’re new to sound and want to learn more, feel free to check out our Audio primer, ear-training app HearEQ, or sign up for our newsletter below.