Tinny Audio Quality

[TimParticipant]

Greetings all.

I’m hoping you can help me: I handle the weekly posting of my church’s sermons to our website for inclusion into our podcast feed. The sermons are recorded on our Qu-32 system directly to a flash drive. (I help run the computers, and don’t do anything with the sound.) On of the challenges that we’ve not yet been able to overcome is a annoying, tinny quality to the audio when I post it up to our stream. I’m afraid I’m a neophyte when it comes to the nuances of sound processing, but the folks better equipped than I at the church haven’t been able to resolve the issue yet either. I thought I might present the question here in hopes that someone more experienced that I (however low that bar may be) might provide some direction on how we can improve the audio quality.

Many Thanks
Tim

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[Nicola A&HKeymaster]

Hi Tim,

I can see a couple of issues with the file you posted:

– Level. The signal you are recording should read around 0dB on the Qu meters, if this is the case I’d expect a reading of around -20dBFS on the audio track. Your track has peaks at around -35dBFS instead, so check your gain structure.

– Further to the above, try normalizing the file to 0dBFS, you can do this with free software (like Audacity) or using any DAW (such as Reaper, Pro Tools etc).

– Bitrate. This mp3 has been encoded at 32kbps which not surprisingly causes a number of artefacts and degrades the sound quality. For speech, try encoding at 192kbps or higher. For music programme you might want to go higher.

The next step would be to use compression (either in the mixer or post-processing the audio file) to reduce the dynamic range of the signal.

Hope this helps.

[moonParticipant]

Hi Tim,
Are you recording just the stereo mix or are you recording multi-track and mixing
after the service is over ?
Are you converting the 48khz/24 bit wave sound files to Mp3 for Podcast playback ?

cheers,
Mike

[Author]

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