Recording podcast guests over a phone or internet connection can present a number of challenges and it’s not unusual to receive guest audio that’s lacking intelligibility. It’s often said that you can’t boost what isn’t there but is that always true?
Factors Compromising Audio
Recording remote guests is a fact of life for podcasters. In an age where being geographically present is no longer a requirement, content creators have the luxury of casting the net far and wide to make the most engaging content with the right guests. While this makes for better listening, phone and internet connections share many technologies that conspire to create audio artefacts that reduce its quality.
The creator must hope that all-out losses don’t happen as drop outs can mean having to ‘go again’ or in extreme cases reschedule the recording. Even consistent connections can present problems such as restricted audio bandwidth or problems arising from heavy-handed noise reduction and/or cancellation systems that prioritize signal resilience over subjective quality.
Audio bandwidth especially suffers when available network or internet bandwidth is reduced. Systems that are optimised to keep working adaptively will affect the upper frequencies when conditions dictate. This problem can be exacerbated with less-than-ideal original audio at the contributor’s end arising from things like mic technique.
UNFILTER from Zynaptiq
While the old adage that “you can’t boost what isn’t there” holds true, engineers nevertheless have a tool in UNFILTER from Zynaptiq that allows the restoration of intelligibility in voice recordings such as podcast contributions captured over a phone or internet connection. By learning a source’s filter response, it can then be used to affect the opposite response to restore missing frequencies in the audio.
Other UNFILTER Features include:
Automatically detect and remove resonances, equalization, roll-offs and the effects of comb filtering from musical, location, dialog and surveillance recordings.
Apply the measured filter response to other signals to place them in the same "acoustic world".
Export the measured filter response to or import it from a linear- or minimum-phase impulse response file (WAV).
Mastering grade adaptive, free-form and graphic equalization.
Extremely steep 96dB/octave shelving high-pass filter.
Output limiter for unsupervised use in batch processing applications.
Highly time-efficient workflow and UI
Making Problems Disappear
Using seemingly magic plugins to restore audio has become a mainstay of post production mixers, and are now increasingly finding their way into the workflows of other professionals. In the case of fully independent creators working with powerful, affordable gear and audio plugins, making things like poor audio go away is a reality.