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Comment by prions | Hacker News Reader

This was the best quote of the article for me:

Forget the lousy microphones and the dinky interstitial stock music — the thing that derails most podcasts is the blab. There are two kinds, more or less. The first is that soft, inquisitive staccato popularized by Ira Glass on “This American Life,” the source from which so much pod-voice appears to have sprung.

The ubiquitous NPR Voice/Sound is really what turns me off from podcasts/audiobooks/etc. While I love NPR, their sound is absolutely grating to listen to. Too HD, rife with extremely loud and detailed plosives and sibilants. I don't want to listen to the speaker suck the spit back down their throats in excruciating detail after every sentence.

NPR's sound quality is too detailed. It's like if you watched a video of someone talking and could see the aftermath of a popped zit smack in the middle of your screen.

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That's fascinating, because the NPR sound is just a close-mic'd Neumann U87 microphone with the bass roll-off engaged:

https://current.org/2015/06/a-top-audio-engineer-explains-np...

The U87 is a classic mic first made in 1967 and used on everything. Lots of famous pop song vocals are still recorded with a U87 to this day. And they're expensive, they cost $3200 new at Sweetwater.

The U87 is a Condenser microphone, while the RE20 mentioned in the article is a Dynamic - I wonder if maybe you don't like the sound of condensers mics in general. They typically have a crisper high-end that catch a lot of detail.

I imagine if you listened to the vocal stem it would sound as extreme. It's just masked by other noise or gated/sliced out most of the time. Some people make a feature of those noises; Muse is an obvious example and they certainly divide people.

So don't listen to NPR? I don't understand how any of this is a reflection of podcasts as a whole. There are so many different podcasters and organisations all doing it completely differently. It's one of the most democratic forms of media consumption that I'm aware of - you can pick any platform, you can pick whatever you want to listen to, you're not locked into a certain player or anything else. If you don't like the way one podcast sounds, listen another podcast.

This sound is from excessive EQ and limiting held over from trying to get the most out of the limited bandwidth of broadcast radio.

My understanding is that, more specifically, it's a sound that's very carefully tailored to the acoustic environment in which NPR is typically consumed: a moving car.

I once heard an interview with an NPR audio engineer where he related how he'd epoxy the studio microphones' bass roll-off switches in place because the setting that most people thought made their voices sound better also made them harder to understand over highway noise.

I didn't see your reply before I posted, but I think I just linked to that interview in my comment above - it includes that anecdote.

>the setting that most people thought made their voices sound better also made them harder to understand over highway noise.

I'm looking at you, Roman Mars of '99% Invisible'.

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