Sound Believability: How Audio Quality Shapes Listener Trust

Already history. Welcome hi to the pro audio suite. Those guys are professional and motivator. Thanks to try Booth, the best vocal booth for home or on the road voice recording and Austrian Audio Making Passion Herd. Introducing Robert Marshall from Source Elements and Someone Audio Post Chicago, Aaron Robert Robertson from Voodoo Radio Imaging, sit Tack to the video stars, George the Tech Whittam from LA and Me, Andrew Peters Voice Sober Talent and home studio Guy Out and welcome to another pro audio suite thanks to Austrian Audio Making, Passion Heard and try Booth. Don't forget the code tri PAP two hundred to get two hundred dollars off your try booth. Now talking audio quality of audio, there's actually been studies done because things are getting a bit sort of wobbly in the quality stakes, but it appears that it has some knock on effect if your audio is not up to speed. So Robert, you've been reading a few articles on this, what's the story? Yeah, Look, I've been doing a bit of reading up on it because it's something that's sort of dear to my heart and there's the one that I'll go back to, and the one that's probably worth talking about the most goes back to twenty eighteen, but it's still very relevant. It was a study that was commissioned between the Australian National University and the USC which I believe is the University of Southern California. And what they did was they were looking into the link between audio quality and its believability. So, in other words, when we listen to something, does the quality of the audio affect how much or whether we actually believe it at all? Actually turns out that that does, and there's actually quite a close link there. So basically, just quickly, what they did was they took a couple of YouTube videos that they were using for educational purposes at the university and they screwed with the quality. So they took a two or three minute grab. Some were pristine quality, some they screwed with it and made it hard to understand. Some they took little chunks out and had little audio glitches, and they gave it to They don't mention how many participants, but it was a whole bunch of participants and effectively, long story short, what it proved was yes, absolutely that the less the audio was understandable, the harder it was for people to believe what they were actually hearing. At a time when audio books, as we were talking about before this episode and all that sort of stuff, are becoming more and more prevalent, and you want people to believe what you're saying, it's probably some pretty good research to be looking at. I'll post the links along with this because it goes much deeper, and I'm just giving you a glossy five second podcast overview. But it's really worth reading. It really is. I would love to read that. Well, it's interesting. I always think you know that Stephen Fry read all of the Harry Potter books. Imagine the difference if it was done with like an AI or something. There's no way the world you get immersed into Harry Potter. If you ever watched Star Wars with the sounddown boring as batshit, yeah, it's just pretty said. It doesn't work. It's just or you know, put it turn do yourself a favor, turn the volume down and make a stupid lightsaber noise, or get your kids to and say, kids, when the lightsaber turns on, what's that sound like? Exactly you know, it's like it's just it's a no brainer. It really is, and we know it. But there are people out there who I don't think want to believe it. I think that's the We all know that video without audio is just surveillance. So it's just kind of it's just the gray area in between that you know. I yeah, I mean this is this came up in discussion because you know, I can. I can sult a ton of audiobook narrators along the way, and some of them are very new, and some of them come from voiceover, some of them have been coached by other folks, et cetera, et cetera. And what I've come away with is that those that coach how to record an audiobook, and this isn't like, let's be specific, this is really more about how to self produce an audiobook as opposed to just how to narrate an audiobook. There are certainly courses and classes you can take on how to produce an audiobook. Right. There's platforms out there for right holders to seek out narrators, and so they hire a narrator essentially in a way. Some of them don't, some do it respec but they get a narrator narrate the audiobook, and the narrator's job is to literally produce the recording, so record, edit, proof, you know, master it. Everything to get the final files delivered is all on the hands or in the hands of a an audiobook narrator. And unfortunately, in a lot of cases, these are often very very new to audio production audiobook narrators because there's a very very low bar to entry to get into doing this, and so there's a lot there's coaches out there, and you know, I'm not disparaging anyone, because again I understand it can seem extremely out of reach to get great audio, and it would be easier just to get the audiobook specs correct, you know, the proper peak levels than room tome levels, et cetera, and just you know, make sure you check all the boxes before you send the files. And you know, maybe it makes a little bit of money, but you don't realize how easy it is to do very minimal things to get much better audio. And I really feel like audio quality bars should be really raised for audiobooks. And here's the other thing is like those qualities that are passing now are for the current audiobook production standards and the audio distribution standards right, which are dramatically lower fidelity than any music streaming platform. Like, listen to an audiobook and listen to a streaming platform. You'll hear the difference. It's dramatically different. Yeah, there's going to be a day where we actually have a demand for because of things like with and said mister Robbo that there are reasons why we want to have much better sounding audio, that it actually really does matter in the way that we hear, in the way that we believe, and the way we're sucked into the story, et cetera, et cetera. And there may some day, I mean, I hope there is an HD or a high definition quality version of audiobook publishing. You know something that really sounds great. So if you record everything and squash it down into garbage because audio quality doesn't all that matter, your stuff's going to be limited to It's almost like, you know what if you recorded everything to sound good on AM radio in the seventies and all your master tapes sounded like an AM radio, and now you want to release that content again and it sounds like AM radio. This happened with TV. Think about like all the TV shows like whatever, even like some TV shows were shot direct to video back in the eighties when all the movies were shot to film and then later on everything gets moved up to HD and it's remastered, but all the stuff shot on video just looks like shit and will look like shit forever because it was caught on an inferior format that was good enough for the broadcast. At the time, no one knew the difference. But now when you want to go back and watch I don't know night Writer or it's I don't know if night Writer was when. I think they did shoot some TV shows actually on film, but some of them just went straight to or video video edited and it just looks like it. Well, do you remember sixty minutes AP. I'm not sure about the States. I'm sure it was probably the same. When sixty minutes started here in Australia, they used to shoot it on thirty five mil. Yeah. Wow, you know, it's like that's that's those days along one. But I remember I remember guys going out leaving location, guys like knees guys. They'd be shooting on film and the guy will be recording on a using a Nagra to get the audio. I mean yea, you know, super high quality stuff, that's right. Yeah. So the thing is, though, I mean a Nagra does sound great, but you know what also sounds great is one hundred dollars task a handheld PCM flash recorder. I don't think I don't think you had that back in the day of Innaugra though, Like, no, no, I know, But I'm saying that the barrier to entry to get great audio fift thirty forty fifty years ago was very costly and very you know, it was out of reach to normal people. The difference now is process, not equipment. Great the crappiest equipment. I mean, even as we've done, you get amazing recording out of an iPhone actually if you just put it in the right place and you have it in the right environment and blah blah blah, Like it's it's it's what you do, not what you do it with. Yeah. So yeah, So it's that's what gets me a little crazy, is like when when when the thought is, like, your job is hard enough. You're an audiobook narrator. You shouldn't have to worry about noises and other you know, room tone and just micro technique and all these you don't need to worry about that. It doesn't matter that much. Well, okay, I can argue that it doesn't in some ways, But in the end, is it going to elevate your career as an audiobook narrator if you do the minimum? No, there's something else with an audiobook, which if it sounds like shit, it's going to be fatiguing to listen to. And that's one thing for like a commercial or something that's quick. But you're looking to engage people over hours. Yeah, and you're putting all this effort into something and you can't redo it, and you like, so little effort is needed to make the recording proper compared to your performance and all the work and effort and reading it that just put that little percentage into capturing it right, so you don't regret having to do it again. Basically because audio to many people sounds like such a black art that they think that, well, it's really hard, there's no way I can understand it, and why bother, let's just get the you know, And it's like just a little bit of education and a little bit of practical stuff and it's not that crazy stupid horror, but it's funny When it comes to video, those people will sit down for days and research how to get the best lighting in their room and how to you know, make their face look the best, and how can I touch this up and fix this up. But when it comes to audio, it's it's like, oh, well, it's as long as you know, as long as you can hear it, it's all. They'll make it look great, and then they'll shoot it with the camera that's mounted on the microphone forty feet away and like, what film good? But that that is true? But then, but then, I'm a huge YouTube consumer. I watch a lot of YouTube. The ones that you see on YouTube are not because you subscribe to them. That is not how YouTube works. YouTube will always show you the next video that the algorithm wants you to see, which is exactly exactly Instagram, etcetera. It's the same freaking thing. And the video it suggests you to watch is extremely well produced, really has great audio across the board, Like it is rare to have a bad sounding, overlooking video get suggested, and that just shows you, like, by the way, it really does matter. I think one of the problems is people don't know what to listen for, and they always make the assumption that whatever it is and I'm hearing, A, I don't know what it is, and B I have no idea how to get rid of it. And therefore, you know, you can see the thing in the background and move it out of the way. But it's much harder to you know, have you ever played that game where you sit there and you listen and people mention all the obvious stuff like the air conditioner is buzzing and this and that. You start eliminating things, but there's always something more to hear, and people don't listen in depth and they just stop at the first two things they hear. There's two things that makes me think of that. One is simply closing your eyes. Right, So if you really want to improve your hearing at the sense of sight, people have no eyesight have incredible hearing. In fact, there is a video, it's not even a joke, of a guy who's blind on a sich bicycle who's using echo cancel yeah, echo location, like Robert was done. He's using echo cancelation, same thing that dolphins and bats use to actually ride a bike. Right, we're that good at hearing, so you take away the site you're hearing immediately is magnified, and you will hear things that you didn't hear before. So that's one. Two is going out of your head having better memory. Two is after one in before three. I had another one that was so great that did you see the one where the same Or there's a kid who rides a skateboard around. He's like going all over the place, and they and they get him inside and they put objects on the table in front of him and he can almost identify them, but he gets down to a pencil standing up and he finally couldn't locate the pencil on the table, but a can of coke and all kinds of stuff. He could just tell you what's on the table in front of him, just by going like that. Unbelievable. If you really do focus on hearing, you'd be amazed what you hear. I had a client the other day said, you know, I had an audio interface on my desk in my booth. It was like an audience or something, but he wasn't he had switched to and he'd switched to an app something else, Apollo or something right, So he's like, oh, I finally removed it from the booth and I could hear the difference, and I was like, are you sure? He's like it's like, I put it back because I thought I was crazy. And I made like a hand clap and I could hear the resonance of the sound bouncing off the audience interface, and I removed it. I was like, yeah, there, you like everything in your everything that has a flat reflective or in the case of this gentleman, even if it's curved like a soda can, has a distinct reflection and he can hear it and you can hear it too. So yeah, hearing things isn't that hard? And and that is all the information you need. Right, it comes back to you darker. You have an idea of what the materials sounds like, the time it takes to come back to you. You know how far away it is. You move your your source sound around, it goes away, it comes back. Now you know how big the thing is. You wonder how submarines are traveling around without, you know, plowing in the mountain surface. Well, the other thing about audio, without getting all technical about sinar and stuff, is the other thing is the place where you use that medium. Like I was driving, I did a road trip to Adelaide on the weekend coming back listening to podcasts and stuff, some of them the audio was sort of more in that or less top end, I guess, and so it was really difficult to hear it. So you're cranking the volume up just so you can hear these people talk. So there was a considerable amount of like low low mid yeah, kind of what we call the mud frequency muddiness. I say, you got the internet that canoism. Yeah. But then on the other hand, if you had an audiobook and you were listening on headphones and someone did the whole book using a full one six you yeah, yeah, yeah, that has to be I mean, I know, I do know audiobook production, the companies. I've been to one that uses it, and I just hope they eq it, you know, I just hope they do something to smooth it out a little bit. Why would you stop though, that's crazy? I don't know. Maybe it's an l A thing because they're in LA the way you process your audio. You know, for example, if you overcompress something, it can be fatiguing and annoying. Yet if you're driving in a car an a noisy environment, that compression really helps with intelligibility, and so it's variable, depends on what you're listening environment is, and it's you know, you're trying to find the happy medium because you can press the Jesus out of it. You can. Yeah, I mean there's a difference between fidelity and intelligibility. So like if we recorded everything for an audiobook to maximize fidelity, it would be a problem. Like you, for that exact reason that Robert just said, it would be hard to make out every word. You know, you've watched You've watched cinema mixes on television, on streaming on Netflix or whatever, and certain things are lost in the mix. You're frustrated, you can't hear the dialogue very well, so you turn it up, and then your wife says, will you turn it down when there's an action sequence because they're trying to maintain realism and have fidelity and have a dynamic range. Well, you cannot have that also and listen to it back in a car or on a subway in AirPods exactly and hear every little every word. So intelligibility and fidelity are not really related. They have to be separated and prioritized in different ways. I think we've just invented a new app. You imagine if you got on going to listen to a podcast and they asked you which environment are you listening? You're listening on a headphones, you listening a car, listening a new set of headphones that actually does it automatically. Well too, Yeah, I think this is part of the delivery where you know, because also this comes up with music. You're listening to music in a car and you want it smashed. You're listening to music at home on your big speakers in a quiet environment and you want it super dynamic. And you can't say that either one is good or bad. But really this ability to control the dynamic range should be flexible based on the user environment. And you know, we all know that setting a compressor is so mysterious, like people might be able to understand EQ, but you start to talk to people that aren't indoctrinated in audio and you talk about compression, it's like gone, you lost them. But this is the kind of thing that AI could do for you. And a feedback loop of the listening environment. Yeah you know. Yeah, see that's a positive side of my eye. Yeah, well, there's so much we can still do. You know that we just muddle along because this is we never had anything better. Right, I have a speaker bar. It's a Samsung, and I don't know what processing it's doing, but it's doing a lot. Like it's not just a speaker, right, It's got a few different listening modes and one's called adaptive, and I leave it and adaptive all the time. And the reason it works is because it seems to be doing exactly that. When we watch a show together, my girlfriend and I, we're never grabbing the remote and going this is annoyingly louder soft. It's constantly adapting to listening material. Is it perfect? No, but it really does control dynamic range and even some higher end home theaters or amps or receivers that almost nobody uses anymore, right because we all use speaker bars. But they have a night mode. Yeah, the night mode is just compression. Yeah. So night mode is like it's sort of like a combination of loudness. Remember I love the loudness nob or the button for loudness. It's just basically, yeah, boosts up the low end so that at low volumes you still get the calm. Yeah. So what they're doing is just a combination of this EQ adjustment and a compression adjustment, so at night you're not pissing off your wife, for your neighbors or whatever, and you can still hear the dialogue, you can still hear the effects and all that, you know, And that's what just that just needs to be normalized. And you are right, Rabo, that should be in headphones. There's no reason I can't be. Apple should be leading the whay on this. And I think they're starting to get into adaptive audio. That's sort of a new feature, I think, you know, but we're just getting there. Have you ever listened to a radio broadcast unprocessed? When I was at a radio station in Newcastle when I was starting out in my career, we were we were building a new transmitter and they were putting in the new processing and just out of interest, we were all everyone was at home. We did it in the middle of the night for obvious reasons. Everyone was at home, and I was listening in my car and the boss was listing on his home stereo, and we were tuning this thing in. And when I say tuning it in, breaking it in, you know, setting it all up. Yeah, And so obviously I got to hear the rayal radio or the raal audio is just a jock sitting in the studio broadcasting his voice straight up the transmitter. It was shit. It was fucking terrible, you know. Until I turned it on and dialed it in, it was two completely different beasts. Yes, yes, it's always like people hearing your own voice is so unflattering. Yeah, you know, well, I mean I just before this, this whole conversation got a bit inspired because not only had a todd A webinar recently about audiobook recording, but I also had to talk today about a client who records audiobooks. He was put a tremendous amount of effort into the sound of his audio, you know, more so than I hear from most audiobook narrators. He was using a really good K eighty seven capsuled microphone. Actually his was a Roswell K eighty seven, which was a really good sounding microphone by the way, and into an Apollo and running through some processing chain, et cetera. And he sent me his file and he said, I moved and I wanted to sound more like this. He sent me the finished audio and I was like, no, you don't, you don't want it to sound like that because it had this tremendous mid upper mid range I'd say two to four K bump. That was really harsh, right, And I said, that's interesting. That doesn't sound nice to me. I wouldn't want to listen to that for it, And he's like, I'm glad you mentioned that. That's interesting. So we got into it. We looked at the EQ, ended up finding out that there was some other things going on in the recording that we're causing that, and turned out that almost flattening the EQ was the fix. Like we almost disabled the EQ, and that mic sounded beautiful with his voice, but what he was hearing his headphone wasn't really what he wanted to hear. Right then I got I was like, well, why don't we just process for your cans. We'll set up a chain in the UAD console that's just for monitoring, and then you print without it. He's like, yeah, but I've already got this whole workflow dialed in and I like it. And he says, well, it doesn't matter because I don't wear my headphones when I record. Anyway, I was like, oh okay. So as we talked more and more, I learned more about his you know, his technique and his production. But I guess all that point of that is to say is he really did care about the quality of the audio. Look, it's something he really was passionate about. He also, of course, did have a radio background, so he understood production to a degree, you know, and so he understood the importance of it. And so it was very satisfying, I guess, is what I'm coming. It was very satisfying to work with somebody who cared enough and we could really work on it together collaboratively, and I would play it back and he would listen, and we would kind of come up with a happy medium where it was something I wanted to hear, something that he wanted to hear, you know, and find that happy medium. It's funny hearing you talk about headphones off, though, because we're one of the biggest sort of talking points. I guess on the Facebook group. Our Facebook group in the last couple of weeks was something that just occurred to me one night. I was thinking I should post something, and I just threw up a poll and said, do you record with headphones? All on? One on one off? No headphones. It's been one of the biggest talking points on the whole freaking page. It's like such a personal thing, isn't it really? Yeaheah, absolutely, Like yeah, this is another thing where this other coach that I was talking with, he coaches wear headphones to audiobook narrators. I I, you know, I can't coach that way because I don't coach. I'm not going to tell you what you should or shouldn't do, but I will tell you the advantages and disadvantages of wearing headphones, right, and I'll let you decide. But my opinion is for audiobook narrators, wearing headphones is needing, un needlessly distracting. And if you're really doing these long form story reads and you're constantly monitoring yourself, kind of splitting your brains left and right hemispheres, and one half's listening to mouth noises and random little set and the other halves being an actor, something's going to suffer. You just can't do both perfectly multitasking. You have to separate them. Well, I pay you're the one, you're the expert on these one would I would wear headphones because if you get you know, if you're doing a read and you're in there, I don't know how long you have audiobook People sit in the studio and read for But if say, for instance, you read for thirty minutes and then you got to play back and you realize you had an issue, which if you've been wearing headphones you would have known about. You just to wasteed half an hour of work because you missed the fact that there was a weird noise going on or they were plosives like you was robot. But you're also performing to the microphone a little bit. The microphone is your audience and then if you have a thing that you need to say, hey and whatever. Yeah, it's all part of the perspective. I think, are you saying that you can't do that effectively, Robert if you don't have the headphones, because then you can't really, I think it's harder to I think it's harder to play the proximity effect and to know your consistency. And I would say, monitor, yeah, you have to have already sort of mastered proximity effect technique without with headphones on, because you need a learn how the proximity effect actually works, and you have to be familiar with it intimately to then be able to take off the headphones if you're going to monitor right, because then you have no idea what you're actually doing. You don't you don't really know until post and then you're like crap. It seems to me there's like three levels of this. There's like the the I don't want to hear myself. I just want to perform, and I'm I'm like a stage actor. I don't want any of this technology on my head. I'm hector all yeah. Then there's the spit I want to monitor myself because I need to hear myself, make sure whatever I'm good in front of the microphone, et cetera. And then there's you've got a few clients like this that like have the volume on the foot pedal and they want to hear like every end of the word and exactly how they're like, you know, the fine tuning of it. And I guess to each his own, but I think in the middle it's like monitor. Yeah, what's interesting. This is one of your things, George, the your analogy. I remember you saying about you know that using like a camera as a as an analogy for audio, and that the same thing is like you don't go with an SLR camera and not use the viewfinder when you're taking a photograph just shooting away hoping you've got it. I mean, it's not going to work. And it's the same when you're using a mic for mic technique and proximity and being able to understand or hear exactly what you're capturing. You can't do it if you don't look through the viewfinder unless you have an engineer on the other side of the glass who's doing this with you, and then you can do that. Then you can be the actor in the Thesbian. For the record, I don't ever remember saying that, but I like what you're like, what you're putting now. I remember you saying about you know that like focus and now the focus and all that, using the visuology of focus and stuff. Yeah, yeah, no, it's true. If you're not looking a through the viewfinder, can you still take a good photo? And yes you can, you can get lucky. It's like you but it's like it's it's it's such a delicate thing because from an audio audio engineer's perspective, we really care about audio. We know what it takes to get there, and so what I do with my client is I impart those things and find ways to kind of, how do I say it, trick them into getting good audio without them thinking so much about it. And it's sort of like so some would say that that's not kosher because you're first of all, you're stacking them, right, so you're now like saying you don't need to know about audio because you have a preset. Then then there's so so the naysayer would say, well, they're just doing a point click finish thing. They don't know what they're doing. But I also have to say that if they don't hear what they're doing, that's also a problem. Right, So if they don't know when it sounds bad, that's a problem. So I want and I want their jobs to be easier because I have voice acting. When done well, it is hard. You know, if you're just reading it, that's easy. I'm not a voice actor. I could sit here and read what's on this screen. It's not going to be good acting. It's going to suck. I can't. But I can read the page. Get I can read the page to you. But I'm the acting is something that takes time and practice, and you know, if you're spending a tremendous amount of time micro analyzing what you're hearing in your headphones and also trying to become a really great actor at the same time. That's really really hard to do. And I'm sure there's some that can. I don't think you can choose to be like and just doing tech support. And I know you've seen this a million times. You have. You have the actor who says, just set me up, show me the three buttons to click, and I don't want to know. I don't And it's like, I don't want to not allowed to say I don't want to know. You can admit that you don't know a lot, you can admit that you only want to know what you need to know. You can say you're amish, right, but if you want to But you can't just say I want all the technology to go away, because it just won't and and you're gonna end up stuck, or you're gonna end up with wasted effort at some point and frustration. I mean, I know we're going way on a here, but are we going to get to a point whether a smart device where recording audio is computational audio in the same way that if iPhone can take a picture that looks really good and near darkness. I don't think a photographer will tell you that a iPhone can take a photograph as well as they can. No, I will agree with that, absolutely so. But it feels like there has been a tremendous amount of effort put into this copy what they call computational photography, where an iPhone can take and a remarkably good photo if you hold the damn thing. If you do two things, hold it still and wipe your fucking fingerprints off the you know, if you do this too, it looks young when people take photos of me on their iPhone. It's the funny thing for me, right, And this is something that I think about a lot, probably because I'm getting old and have nothing better to do and cranky. But don't you find don't you find it interesting that we're constantly chasing backwards even though technology is moving forward. And I'll give you two examples in an audio sense, Let's talk about valve emulation, right, or vinyl emulation. You know, for your master, you know, he's some vinyl emulation or some valve or we're constantly looking at digital video and going how do we make it look more like thirty five mil you know what I mean. And it's like we move to this pristine, beautiful, you know, flawless media, whether it's video or audio. But we're looking backwards going, well, it doesn't look real. I think there's like a really good example this. My friend has done some amazing nature recordings and he has this whole series of downloadable apps and you can listen to this stuff and it's a call let's plug it nature, nature or something. Okay, you find it, we'll put him there. And so he's now doing this stuff in outmost and then falls around and whatnot. And you take a pair of microphones out in the wild, you go to the rainforest and you're like, there you go, I have the what or the noyman head? Perfect right, no boring, yeah wah. And so what he does now is he he's like, okay, you're sitting here in the in the rainforest, right, well, here's your noyman head. But then on top of it, he takes an umbrella and he drips water on the umbrella. Yeah, and he puts that over your head and that's water dripping on the leaves. And he puts a brook over there, and he builds. This whole scene is nothing that you could ever hear, but when you listen to it, you're like hyper real and really buy it more than if you go there it'd be like eh, like just because now it's now it's not just an audible, audible experience, it's a sensory experience. Yeah, it's a sensory. It's translating into a sensationing you in a place in a time, which is what d I should do and what a good film does. But it's not about it's not about technical accuracy. It's not about pixel peeping or whatever the thing is. It's not about that. And when you hear it, you don't say, oh, that's impossible. I've never heard like like you say, I've never heard such detail. What an amazing microphone and you're like, that's seven recordings layered on top of each other. But he does it in such a way that you just buy it, hook line and sinker. That's really impressive because that is really the audible version, audio version of this great cinematography or a great piece of film. It's like, unless you're a film maker, then you go, oh, that was a great shot with that one hundred millimeters portrait lens or you know whatever, pancake lens or whatever. But like everybody else is going WHOA, right, they don't they're not going less is pennies, you know. It's like it's just like whoa, you know, And that's if you can do that with audio. And in the meantime there's like this amazing thing going on of production layers and thought and mixing and all this, and that's that's artistry. That's that's awesome. Yeah, now I know we've shut off in a wild tangent, and that's what we do here, folks, if you're our first time listener. But I got one final question because it's going to be a very long episode, but one final question. This one is for Robot and Robert, and we're going back to the audio book. So you've got you're actually recording an actor reading a book. The actor says, I'm I don't want to wear headphones during the session. You're getting a great performance, but all the way through it, the guy has no mic technique and you've got all sorts of issues like plo sieves and different things. What do you do? Do you stop and break the performance which you may not get again because this is so good? Or do you just let it roll and then try and work out how you're going to fix the audio and post. Well, I think that if if it's one of those actors that once they come back in and it sounds like shit and they're not going to admit to any sort of fault on their own, then I stop them and I say, hey, you got to keep your head in the same place relative to the microphone. That's that or the other thing. And the first thing is you kind of listen to it is like how bad is it? Can I you know, ride the base EQ and try to keep the proximity constant even though it's not or something like that. But ultimately it's to me about whether or not the clients are going to understand and accept that this is a great performance, because it's not just about the performance. It's also about moving the session forward. You have an hour to record this. If we keep on starting over again, we're never going to get it done. So you know, maybe in between takes you say, hey, you got to keep yourself in the same spot, and if you don't, we're going to have some compromises that we're going to face. And if they keep on doing it as long as I've mentioned it as early as I can without breaking the performance that I need you to do your part so I can do my part. Then after the fact I can say, hey, I told you keep your head still. On the other hand, does the actor ever respond like, oh, you know, I'm so sorry or are they more like it? Guess it depends, right, Some people be like, oh, you're right, I'm sorry I did that, or others might be in Usually, I've never seen anybody really have a big problem. So you say like, hey, I need you to see still or don't turn your head so much. At the end of the day, that's what you're being paid for, you know, as a voice talent. So and I might try to switch the mic if I have a chance. You know, if they're in a shotgun and they just can't have enough discipline to be in a shotgun, you get a U eighty seven out and try to do I think you do what you can to facilitate the voice actor, because you know, at the end of the day, they're getting paid to do a performance and you can't. Everybody is different in the terms of what they want to hear, see do when they're performing. But at the end of the day, I guess to paraphrase what Robert's saying, because I'm pretty sure we both agree here is at the end of the day, the client's the one that's paying you for a result, and your job is to balance the needs of the actor against the result that the client's expecting. And I don't think client's expecting. Are recording where it's quite obvious that the voice sactor can't stay on MIC no matter how much you chase stuff and how much you fix stuff up. It's you know, it's like a little sure, but if it's big obvious you know, movements, and it can cause you a lot of work after the fact. I mean, you might save the session an extra half hour and having them stop and start by not having them stop and start, But then you're going to sit there a half hour for a half hour writing a queue and level trying to Like you said, Robert, it depends on the town. Yeah, yeah, it depends who's in the chair and what their rate is. I mean, sometimes you say, hey, keep you know, stop stop doing that, Just keep on doing it. I reckon The takeout from this one is and it goes right back to the beginning with if you're doing all the books, don't use a shotgun for many reasons. The sound is wrong and the proximity is a problem. I still argue that some people would be better off with a headset mic or a head warn mic. So it's in the same freaking place, all Just use it for aod a good lava leer on the bill of a head at Yeah, and you'll never be in the wrong place no matter what you do. Thanks for reminding me of that one. That's such a simple hack, I mean for me. The other good one is the stocking you know shields, because if you if you sort of keep get your head back and you're on a decent microphone, if you get back your head back to a similar position and you use your fist or whatever to measure, you can still come back to the same place. You know why music music engineers use them. Well, you know the thing, you know, the thing that you put on your dog when he gets outside the line. You just get a little color like that. Note that no, don't get kind of lift your leg on something. The audio Suite and Austrian Audio recorded connect edited by Andrew Peaters and mixed by you Imaging we have to take support from George the Techo. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and joining the conversation on our Facebook group to leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say today, drop us a note at our website dot com