Audio engineer explains NPR's signature sound (2015)
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You gotta give the people what they want and a guy half-whispering into a condenser sideways just ain't it :-) (at least in my case).
At one point I had the wild idea of building a Series 500 chassis with discrete signal processors instead but shelling out $1500 for such only for _videoconferencing_ (and occasional recording) would have been completely irresponsible.
[1] https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/Ultralite5--motu-ult...
What software are you using / what workflow?
As mic I use an SM57 which is fed into a DBX 286 compressor/de-esser/gate/enhancer and that signal is going to the videoconferencing application and is looped back into my headphones. The neat thing about the 286 is that it's fully analog so I can still hear myself with zero latency.
For the return signal from the videoconference I have a seperate audio interface that feeds into a Behringer Autocomp to compress practically all the dynamic range out of it and then it's going to a t.c. electric finalizer to do some multiband compression which fixes most midrange heavy gaming headsets.
This gear also has a dual purpose as outboard gear for audio production stuffs though, it's not just for the video conferencing.
At the simplest, this could be a $35 external webcam and a lamp or ring light to give yourself the most flattering possible angle. Or even spending $0 and just rearranging your existing setup.
Love it, hate it, or otherwise... I look like a sack of potatoes so it brings me no joy to say this but, it's reality. The way you look and sound has an influence on how you and your ideas will be perceived by others. Might as well spend some time and (perhaps) a few dollars on it because it's ingrained deep in our biology for better or worse.
The good news is remote work has leveled the playing field quite a bit here. It's far less work than looking and sounding great in person.
Expecting me to spruce up beyond what I would ordinarily look like in person is just ludicrous. This isn't instagram, and i'm not trying to gain any followers from a work call. I'll just chalk this one up as another thing I can blame on the unrealistic expectations people have come to think is required because of the influence they've allowed social media to have over them.
I'm certainly not the best looking person, but adding an external webcam from a different angle definitely was noticed by coworkers in a positive way. I end up in a ton of marketing calls, and often I have to be the engineering voice that speaks up to say 'we can't do it that way, here is an alternative'. Since paying attention to my camera setup, my warnings get taken more seriously and have more attention paid to them.
Nobody is expecting you to look like a model or do a photo shoot, but spending a little bit of time improving camera angle, lighting, and mic really does pay off. No photographer takes low angle shots of close up faces since it's generally very unflattering, but that's the typical setup for a laptop on a desk. Just buying a cheap desk mic and a external webcam really will level up your presence in meetings. Don't think of it as Instagram bullshit, look at it as a way to use your tech skills to lifehack having a better interpersonal presence than you might have in person. Seriously, for ~$100 you can have a nicer camera and mic than 90% of everyone else, and having those things makes people treat you more seriously.
At some point, I decided to spruce up my appearance. Shaved the hair and beard, bought collared shirts, switched to an external webcam on a boom arm, with a green screen and software to generate a soothing backdrop instead of my cluttered electronics lab. Added a decent quality directional microphone (also boom-mounted) and installed better lighting.
I also replaced my profile photo, taken with the same up-the-nostril webcam, with a professionally taken photo.
The level of respect and engagement from my colleagues went through the roof. Best tech lifehack I ever did.
Next, I'll be reading having to wear a coat and tie on a zoom call. The old days you had to have your IBM approved suit with your high&tight (or similarly strict) hair style and closely shaved face. Everyone got sick of that, and it went to casual fridays are still too uptight, so flip flops, shorts and tanktops became the norm. Long hair any above the shoulders became fashionable, and bonus points if you pulled it up into a bun.
now, the pendulum has swung back, and people are trying to differentiate themselves by going back to smartly dressed clean cut. round round like a record, and yet it never ceases to amaze how the repeat makes it out like its the brand new thing nobody has ever seen before. just like redoing your entire code base in $newLanguageDijour.
I'm shocked at the pushback on this, it shouldn't be surprising that people like seeing decent looking people. You don't need to loom like an Instagram model, I certainly don't. But spending 15 minutes on Amazon and 20 minutes of setup time to make yourself look better on video calls isn't a huge ask. Hell, BO issues from not showering would be a more major career-limiting move in an office, and on zoom the only way your coworkers can tell you didn't shower is if you actively look greasy. This is way less of an ask, acting like making yourself presentable on camera is a huge burden is crazy to me. It's way easier to be presentable on zoom, because again just spending $30 on a mic is a game changer.
so until everyone starts to use teleprompters, it is just so off-putting to me that i just can't do it.
Reading through the comments I don't get the impression anybody else thinks it's new either. It reads like you're just looking for reasons to insult people. That's a shame.
If you want to seek out jobs where remote conferencing is eschewed and nobody sees each others' faces, I think that's valid. I won't insult you.
For me there is a strong positive mental health component to having at least some brief human contact with my coworkers, even if it's just Zoom. However quite honestly 15 minutes a day is plenty for me usually... I am much closer to feeling like you than the "return to office" advocates, that is certain.
I hope that as individuals and as a society we can get to a point where we accept that some people want to work remotely and anonymously, some want to work in offices, and many prefer someplace in the middle. When we accept this maybe we can stop insulting people who feel differently.
Not just the angle. I run my Sony A7S2 as a webcam, usually with the 24-240 allround zoom - and people come and say all the time how good the picture is, simply because they're used to everyone running the potato-quality webcam.
It's a fucking shame that even Apple's multi-thousand-dollar MBP lineup has crap cameras. Yeah, I get it, thin-ness is part of Apple's secret design sauce, but cameras need space so that they can have proper sized sensors and lenses.
(Side note: an external camera has the benefit of being able to point it on your cats. In long-running meetings, showing off your cats tends to be a great mood improver)
The rule is: if a pet makes it into the shot somehow, you HAVE to bring them up for a close-up
I don't think the point is mainly about sprucing up beyond what you ordinarily look like. Aside from what others have said, one thing to consider is how the eyes and ears work in person vs via screen + webcam / mic + speakers.
Differences between a human eye and a webcam make it so that when you look at someone in person, even in shitty unflattering light and in a cluttered environment, you'll mostly see that person as they "normally" look. But stick a webcam and a screen in between, and all bets are off. Especially if you're going to use high contrast (think dark skin + white shirt or the reverse, with a strong backlight for bonus points).
Same for listening. You can usually hear people when you're talking to them and there's noise around if you focus a bit. But put a crappy laptop mic and speakers in between, and good luck understanding anything they say.
I don't often use my webcam and tend to turn off incoming video because I don't enjoy teams melting my laptop. But it's an atrocious, infuriating experience trying to talk to someone when I can barely hear their voice and instead am able to follow what their colleagues are saying or counting how many cars go past their window. Taking a little care to be understandable doesn't mean you're expected to be some world-class speaker.
In an act of malicious compliance, I went to a second hand shop and picked up an old USB webcam for $3 with complete potato quality. After about an hour or so it also starts glitching out with weird green and purple patterns, a pretty good sign that the meeting has gone on for too long.
E.g. always a messy house, never any time to clean up? Move the desk half a metre out from the wall and flip the setup around. Now it will be clean 100% of the time as far as what the camera can see.
She did a good job of pointing out how the video surroundings made a substantial impact on how the candidate was perceived when interviewing remotely.
But do you really need great video for video conferencing?
Fuck it, buy some cheapy LED panels (Lidl are doing roughly iPad-sized SAD lights for under 20 quid), some gel to tame the colour, and do yourself a proper three-point lighting setup.
Honestly, laptop webcam + flattering angle + decent lighting = also absolutely fine, but it's harder to get a nice angle with something built into the laptop.
IMO a DSLR would only be useful if you're going for a filmlike look of softly blurred backgrounds, or maybe low light shooting made possible by the bigger lens and sensor. At that point it's probably bordering on ostentatious.
At my last company the CEO had something like that, but he also used that setup for calls with investors and news outlets and such, so it made a lot of sense.
I have a Røde mounted SE X1 condenser microphone which picks up absolutely everything; couldn't use it without my GPU.
Putting a bit of effort into my audio setup has been a great thing for WFH. Kudos to yourself for doing the same.
It's a common misconception that certain types of microphones are more sensitive to background noise. Truth is, even if a microphone is more sensitive, it still picks up foreground and background noise equally.
There are some caveats--you can reject background noise with the right polar pattern and mic placement, background noise might be buried in the microphone's self noise, and other minor quirks. But in general, changing microphones is not an effective way to eliminate background noise.
This is something that I've never been able to put my finger on but have always appreciated
> It can adversely affect the ability to achieve life goals and enjoy social situations. It was first recognized in 2001 though it is still not in the DSM-5 or any similar manual.
Oof, as someone that suffers from moderate misophonia, I can assure you it is real and how lucky you are to have not heard of it. It can be torturous, and I don't even have it that bad.
There's a subreddit with 62k members if you're curious https://www.reddit.com/r/misophonia
Remember the Simpsons episode where Homer's nose whistling was what finally made Flanders snap?
Whether it's a serious AND common AND acute disorder is up for debate. In the early/mid-2000's a fire started smoldering on the Internet regarding wanting to find a clinical jargony label for every aspect of life, and Wikipedia turned it into a wildfire.
She doesn't always seem as bad off radio, I don't know if other places EQ her differently or what, but you can get a pretty good idea from this video around 5:35 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84_fptorOso
On NPR it somehow seems even more nasally, and even screamy at times. I can't last more than a few minutes without muting.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/CA-heIfsJ0g/maxresdefault.jpg
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTc2NDg5ODAzNl5BMl5B...
That style of speech is deeply engraved to match that personality type in my mind.
I don't think it's really about their audio engineering. NPR just selects for voices that are quirky to signal that they're outside more mainstream journalism.
When I was in my 20's I sometimes couldn't stand that characteristic sound of NPR, because I could hear every tiny movement of saliva in the speaker's mouth. Sometimes, I just couldn't ignore it anymore, and lost track of what they were talking about entirely. No other radio station has that issue, haven't seen youtubers either.
Superglue!
Watch the Insider Business shorts, they are great example for exactly this style of stuff.
If your browser/platform won't let you do this, well, you know what to do.
> Back when I worked in Detroit, we were an RE20 station. And a lot of on-air talent — and we get a little bit of this here at NPR — likes to sound a little bit more authoritative, and they hit the microphone into the flat position to get that bassy sound. In Detroit, we used epoxy to hold all of the switches into a position so that couldn’t happen again. And, honestly, we do see that occasionally here. We’ll hear something bassy and we’ll run up to the studio and, sure enough, somebody switched it.
> Over the past 10 years, you see more computer screens throughout every broadcast plant. And often that microphone is real close to the computer screen: Depending on how close, you can actually hear some of the electronic interference off the computer screen. The computer screen is the big issue. If it is just a little too close to that microphone, your voice is reflecting off of it.
These sorts of anecdotes were selected from this engineer's mass of experience because of the natural, free-flowing form of an interview, and the informed interviewer's knowledge of the field.
Demanding everything be reduced down to a sentence or two of instruction – much less calling it a waste of time – completely misses the point of this form of communication.
I wonder what having a conversation with people with this "bullet points or nothing" would be like. I'm guessing they aren't very long.
The saddest thing is, informed interviewers are rare these days :(
Glynn Washington usually has something interesting to listen to: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/449018144/snap-judgment
I'm seeing one go for above US$ 3K on Amazon right now: https://www.amazon.com/Neumann-87-Switchable-Studio-Micropho...
Right now I use the mic on the wire that came with my previous Bose QC35 headphones (I use them with my QC45 because I don't like the bluetooth mic). Let's say I want to step-up my microphone game but I also don't want to spend a ton (max around ~$250, flexible if strongly recommended one goes above it). Does anyone have any good mic recommendations? I just want to sound good and clear. I have medium-to-deep voice but can be nasally often because of allergies.
Are pop filters recommended? Something like this: https://www.bswusa.com/Pop-Filters-BSW-RE27POP-P1419.aspx
When they're good they're very good, but the fussiness never ends. e.g. I hope you're happy keeping your head in the exact correct position for an entire 1hr zoom call.
A top audio engineer explains NPR’s signature sound (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26832636 - April 2021 (187 comments)
An audio engineer explains NPR’s signature sound - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11980977 - June 2016 (237 comments)
Everyone compresses. Especially in FM radio. And if you know people downstream of you will compress your content, then generally you do it first, so you have control over how it's done.
Apparently the NPR way, at least in 2015, was to throw up their hands and give complete control over multiband compression to the local stations, which is kind of interesting.
You can spend days or weeks doing research, if you really want. My advice is to get a USB microphone if your budget is more like $100, and get a USB interface + XLR microphone if your budget is more like $200. For XLR mics, get something ordinary and boring like a Shure SM58 or an Audio-Technica AT2020. Keep your plosive Ps and Ks from blowing into the mic, keep the mic about 10cm / 5" away from your mouth, and bam, you've got wonderful, clear sound.
Known traps: The SM7b has low sensitivity, and there's a good chance you'll need a FetHead or Cloudlifter (or outboard preamp) to get the levels you need. SM7b shouldn't be your first mic.
Known misinformation: "This microphone is so sensitive, it picks up all sorts of background noise." This is almost always wrong! Any microphone which is more sensitive to background noise is also more sensitive to foreground noise. The net effect is close to zero.
Absolutely great setup for around 200 bucks - if the way you make money depends at all on to getting people to listen to what you have to say (which should mean pretty much everyone reading this) then this is an absolutely no-brainer investment.
1. Pick a dynamic mic (USB: Rode Podcaster, XLR: SM7B or Rode Procaster, USB+XLR: Rode MV7) over a condenser mic (Yeti) if your space isn't treated or quiet.
Dynamic mics generally reject room noise better than condenser mics and have a lower noise floor. Switching to a dynamic mic hugely reduced the physical sound treatment and audio adjustments I needed to get great sound.
2. Consider wired in-ear monitors for meetings. I like Shure's SE215 — they come in a clear colour that's pretty subtle. It completely removes audio feedback that some meeting apps are still not great at masking if you were using speakers before, and obviously prevents Bluetooth issues too.
This is absolutely a misconception, and it’s what I was talking about in the last sentence.
Think about it this way—how would a microphone distinguish between room noise and other types of noise? The answer is simple—it can’t, but microphones do have polar patterns which allow them to reject noise based on the direction of the noise, and you can combine that with good microphone placement to achieve good rejection of unwanted noise.
(I encourage people with both types of microphones to do an experiment. You can set up the mics identically by swapping them out and adjusting the gain so that the signal level is the same for both. You can use something simple like a pink noise file playing on your phone, 10cm away from the mic, as a reference sound source to adjust levels. It turns out that different mics with the same polar pattern mostly record the same background noise, at the same volume! Keep in mind that there are lots of minor variations in polar patterns that will throw this off.)
This misconception is a stubborn myth. Whether your room is treated has no bearing on whether you want to use a condenser or dynamic mic. These days, improvements in mic technology have really narrowed the gap between both mic types.
When we talk about noise floor, we can talk about it in terms of SPL equivalent, and you’re right, dynamic mics typically have a lower noise floor. But the noise floor on a typical microphone is going to be very, very low—something like 5-20 dB SPL equivalent. This means that the noise you get on recordings will be dominated by other factors—mostly, the acoustic noise in the room, and the noise from the microphone preamplifier you use. My (very quiet) room is about 32 dB SPL, which is much higher than mic noise. Microphone preamp noise will be much higher for dynamic microphones, because you typically need more gain to get usable levels, and the noise in the first stage of the preamp is amplified. For this reason, you’ll typically see higher amounts of noise when using a dynamic microphone, even though the microphone itself is producing less noise. This is why people complain about the SM7b—they’re really complaining because they bought an SM7b and found out that their microphone preamp has too much noise and not enough gain to use the SM7b effectively.
If you do have problems with room noise, switching microphones is not an effective way to help out (assuming you already have a decent cardioid microphone). What does help is to place the microphone close to your sound source (but not so close you get exaggerated bass), and if the noise is coming from a specific direction, point the microphone’s null (the opposite end of the mic) towards the noise source to cancel it out. You are equally trying to make the signal louder and the noise quieter when you place a mic.
(If this comment sounds rehearsed, it’s because I feel like I’m on a mission to bust this particular misconception.)
Discovering that background noise is largely down to distance from mic plus gain makes me want to explore condenser mics again, paying more attention to polar patterns and learning how to set them up better somehow.
I preferred how I sounded with my condenser mics but struggled to reduce room noise without also reducing voice levels significantly, even when I was basically on top of the mic and hearing the proximity effect. I tried two condensers and both picked up ambient noise and road noise. I was researching noise gates/compressors at work when a colleague said, “just switch to a dynamic mic” and that ended up working, apparently for different reasons than I'd assumed — guessing a different pattern or gain…
It seems that many current FM stations don't have great sound quality, and I don't know why. Bad EQ and audio processing for the music they are playing? Lossy audio compression? Lower channel bandwidth and/or interference from digital signals or other sources? Weaker power? Distortion and clipping in the music itself? Worse noise pollution?
Good FM radio seems to have enhanced stereo separation, clear highs and midrange, warmer but not overwhelming bass, and some compression on pop/rock stations to make the quieter bits audible in a car.
Bad FM seems more harsh/strident, distorted, noisy, etc..
From what I hear, people will just dial up the settings on the audio processing chain at a modern FM radio station.
(I wish I can find one with more significant difference).
It's not like this is for team chat in an MMORPG. It's a radio station.