What Do Podcasters Do in a Podcast Room?
People listen to podcasts to hear news and insights on the world around them. They also want to be entertained by cohosts’ riffing and jokes or get lost in narrative storytelling.
It’s hard to do those things with a muddy or reverberant sounding recording. A well-treated or soundproofed room can prevent that from happening.
Acoustic Panels
In order to eliminate reverberation and echo in a podcast room, podcasters use sound absorbing materials. These materials are soft, porous, and dense, which allows them to absorb audio frequencies rather than letting them bounce around the room. This helps to create a much quieter and more controlled space that is better for recording podcasts. A good place to start with this type of treatment is with the walls of a room. By using fabric wrapped acoustic panels on the wall, you can drastically cut down on sound reflections that lead to bad podcast recordings.
Large surfaces like furniture, curtains, full bookshelves, and decor in a room can also act as sound absorbing materials. This is because these items are often made of fabrics or dense materials that can absorb a lot of audio frequency waves and prevent them from bouncing around the room and back into your microphone. This is an important step, especially if you're doing interviews or have people coming into your studio to listen to the podcast.
When a sound wave hits a hard surface, it loses its energy very quickly. On the other hand, when a sound wave hits a softer surface, such as an acoustic panel, it loses its energy much more slowly. This is because the acoustic panels are made of a dense material that absorbs and diffuses sound waves at the same time.
As a result, the sound in a room treated with acoustic panels tends to be very clean, which some podcasters may find unnatural for their work. To add a little more life and depth to the room's sound, podcasters can use sound diffusers. These are materials that scatter and diffuse sound waves, allowing them to remain live and energetic.
The most common way to treat a room for podcasting is to use acoustic panels. These are specially designed acoustic panels that reduce reverberation and echo in rented or owned rooms. They come in many shapes, sizes, and materials, and can be installed on the wall, ceiling, or as standalone partitions. They can even be hung over windows to prevent outside noise from interfering with a recording.
Bass Traps
Whether you’re starting out on your own with a cheap audio interface or something more professional, your podcast will sound better and be less distracting to your listeners with a little room treatment. Acoustic panels remove excess reverberation, while bass traps help to reduce overpowering low frequencies that can cause muddy or boomy sounds.
While there are many different acoustic treatments, the most effective and easiest to use for home and small to mid-sized studio spaces are bass traps. These devices are designed to be placed in the corners of the room where the bass frequencies tend to dominate (trihedral and dihedral corners). The basic concept is that the device turns the low-frequency energy into heat energy, which effectively eliminates the resonance.
Bass traps can be made from a variety of materials, but most are constructed as some form of Helmholtz resonator, named for the German scientist Herman von Helmholtz (1821-1894). They’re large boxes with a specific opening at one end that resonates at a particular frequency. The frequency at which the bass trap resonates is determined by its dimensions, and the amount of damping material inside the box. Any sound waves at the resonant frequency will be absorbed by the damping material, and their energy turned into heat.
In most cases, bass traps will be covered with some type of fabric or upholstered to make them more visually appealing and easier to clean. A skeleton frame made of wood or fiberglass is often used to support the absorbent core, and the whole device is then covered with the desired covering. These coverings are usually made from some type of thick, flexible foam or rockwool to add more acoustic absorption.
Bass traps are one of the simplest, most cost-effective ways to improve your podcast’s acoustic quality. And they’re a good place to start when addressing your podcast’s acoustic treatment needs because they’re the most versatile, and do a great job at eliminating the widest range of problems — such as standing waves, speaker boundary interface, room modes, etc.
Reflection Filters
Podcasts often feature ambient sounds such as animal noises, background chatter or rockets launching into space. These sound effects are used to help set the scene and create an immersive experience for listeners. However, if you're recording in a room with excessive reverb or echo this can sound unprofessional and make your podcast sound less polished. To improve the audio quality in your recording space you can use a simple trick: reflectors.
These are essentially small boxes that your microphone sits inside of and absorbs the reverb and echo. They are very cheap and easy to buy and work quite well. You can get them from most online music stores or home studio suppliers. They come in two different types – the more common open-top design that your microphone mounts into and then the less commonly used box type design which you simply place the mic inside of.
Investing in premium podcasting equipment and a good-sized podcast studio is one thing, but you need to be able to control the environment you are working in to prevent outside noises from getting into your recordings. Whether that's your neighbors playing drums or watching TV loudly, or perhaps even a pet dog who refuses to stop barking.
The biggest problem with home recording environments is that they are often not designed to be acoustically treated, unlike a professional studio that is built to the exacting standards required to produce high-quality recordings. Regardless of the quality of your mic and audio software, a noisy environment will still result in bad audio.
To avoid this, you should consider localized treatment, where you create a little pod around your mic and treat the area specifically where it is located. This is more effective than treating the whole room and can be as simple as popping your mic into a cat bed or covering it with blankets. Portable vocal booths are also available which are effective at reducing external noises and controlling room acoustics directly around the microphone.
Household Absorbers
Even in the best rooms, some of the sounds recorded will bounce around a room. Those bounces can create echo or reverberation, which makes your podcast sound less professional and can interfere with the audio quality of your voice. Using acoustic treatment in your recording space can help tame these bounces and reverberations, improving the sound quality of your podcast.
Acoustic treatments are used in both professional studios and home recording spaces to improve the acoustic quality of a room for better recording. These treatments are designed to soften or absorb sounds rather than reflect them, and they are often made from special materials that are much more effective at absorbing certain frequencies than others.
The most common type of acoustic treatment is an acoustic panel. These panels are typically constructed of thick fabric, and they can be placed on the walls of a recording room to reduce reverberation and echo. They can be purchased from a variety of manufacturers, and they range in cost from very affordable to quite expensive.
Another type of acoustic treatment is a bass trap. These are similar to acoustic panels, but they are constructed to capture low frequency sounds. They can be very effective in reducing low frequency reverberation and reverberation in large or cavernous rooms.
There are also acoustic sound blankets available, which are thick blankets that can be used to absorb reverberation and reverberations in small spaces. These can be placed over a microphone stand or other source of noise, and they can greatly improve the sound quality of your podcast recordings.
It is important to remember that while the acoustic treatment is an essential part of any podcasting space, you also need a quality piece of equipment. If you are interested in making a professional quality podcast, investing in an audio interface and a microphone can be well worth the extra investment.
It is important to note that even with the most soundproofed room in the world, it can still be difficult to block out major sound sources like loud construction or neighbors yelling at their kids. In addition, minor sounds can sneak in from other parts of the house causing the sound quality to suffer.
People listen to podcasts to hear news and insights on the world around them. They also want to be entertained by cohosts’ riffing and jokes or get lost in narrative storytelling. It’s hard to do those things with a muddy or reverberant sounding recording. A well-treated or soundproofed room can prevent that from happening. Acoustic…