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Sound engineer / audio consultant Brett Leonard joins Sean to talk about simple room setups that will help a small business owner capture cleaner sound for Zoom meetings, video shoots, podcasts, and other online marketing efforts, plus some accessible tips on what equipment to buy.

Learn more about Brett at http://blpaudio.com/

Click above to listen to the 26 min audio.

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Sean Corbett:
Hello, again, everybody Sean Corbett here, websites.ca marketing. The episode today, we’re going to talk about audio. So obviously, if you’re ever doing any video to promote your business, audio is a part of that. If you’re working on podcasts, if you’re appearing on podcasts, or even if you’re just doing Zoom meetings in this time where there’s so much remote work, then thinking about how you can get a decent audio quality is something worth planning.
So what I did is, I brought in a professional audio engineer and audio consultant today, his name’s Brett Leonard. He runs a company BLP Audio. He’s also director of Music Technology Programs at the University of Indianapolis. Brett, thanks for being here.

Brett Leonard:
Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be on.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, it’s good to chat with you again. Brett and I met back in the old Montreal days when websites.ca had a Montreal office. So, why don’t you tell the folks a little bit about your background?

Brett Leonard:
So I started as a musician, like so many audio engineers. I was playing in rock bands and playing music and got interested in the studio. When I was on the other side of the glass I was playing and I was like, man, those guys on that side seem to have a lot going on. I don’t know what all those knobs and buttons do and just hung around a bit and got interested in audio engineering. And then as I went through school, I realized there was a ton of physics and acoustics and electronics involved in all of this. And there was a lot lurking just beneath the surface.
So I got really interested in acoustics, particularly small room acoustics. Most people have suddenly been thrust into in the last couple of years where everything’s happening in a bedroom or an apartment or a small space. That was where my focus was, thinking about home studios and smaller production studios. So that’s my background. I still make records now and again, but that acoustic side of things is really where my passion is these days.

Sean Corbett:
Nice. And you were focusing a lot as well on classical recordings and even the technical side of things too for a while, right?

Brett Leonard:
Yeah. And I’ve been really lucky. I’m a classical engineer by training. That kept up through all of my schooling and researching and all that stuff. But it’s interesting because in the classical world, a lot of times you show up and there’s a dressing room or a bathroom or a broom closet backstage, and that becomes your studio while you’re recording in this beautiful concert hall.
So I dealt with a lot of bad acoustics as a practitioner and then started to look at, okay, how can we fix this in a semi-permanent setup, like a home studio. And I’m actually sitting in my home studio right now. It’s a little noisy, because we’re putting up some extra soundproofing right now, but I’ve gone through probably seven or eight studio builds now. So I’ve learned how to do things right for tons of money, but then also, what you can do to get a good sound without spending quite so much.

Sean Corbett:
Nice. And I should say just to the listeners too, that you’ll want to do as I say and not as I do, because one thing you can’t control, this is your internet connection. So sometimes you can have the best audio set up in the world. And then if you live up on a mountain, like I do, and you just want to record people, you’re going to get maybe not the best sound.
So, that without caveat in mind, we’ll jump into some of the questions that could help them a bit. And so Brett, the reason obviously you and I were talking before the recording about having you on, because one of the things you were doing during the whole shutdown time is you were helping people that maybe weren’t super familiar with audio recording and you were helping them get packs of equipment together that they could easily use and get up and running, without too much technical knowledge, is that right?

Brett Leonard:
Yeah. It was a crazy time. There was about a month and a half or so where everyone was of balancing their phone on a lampshade somewhere in their living room and doing Zoom meetings or conference calls or performances or whatever their of main focus was. And then once people caught on to the fact that the whole thing was not going away anytime soon, all of a sudden there was this incredible demand for, okay, we have a budget, we need to send out 50 kits to all of our board members or to all of our trustees and get them all on a call where there’s a decent quality that, let’s say shareholders or stakeholders and a project can all listen in and everyone clear and in intelligible.
So I became familiar with a whole segment of gear that I hadn’t really focused much on before. There’s this cool, really oriented towards mobile documentary and cool kid gorilla video projects, where there’s this whole segment of products that are oriented towards mobile device audio. And one of the companies that I ended up leaning heavily on for the last few years is an Australian company called Røde that makes a cool little shotgun mic. And they basically package the whole thing, so it’ll clip on to just about any modern phone. And you might need a lightning or USBC dongle to adapt, but otherwise you can really up your audio quality for under a hundred bucks. It was a game changer for us.
So as the pandemic settled in, we bought out the last stock that B&H in New York had. We wiped them out and then no one else could get them for a while. But we had them all in use within a couple of weeks.

Sean Corbett:
That’s interesting because the prosumer market, electronics, like you said, you wouldn’t really have dipped into before because you were accessing the highest level of pro equipment, but nowadays, even since the last time we hung out, nowadays, well, I should say both your phone, but also what you said, the technology that can connect to your phone is so advanced compared to what we used to work with. It’s pretty crazy.

Brett Leonard:
And for me, I encounter a fair bit of prosumer equipment, but it’s usually USB based or something like that. So it’s all oriented towards a desktop or laptop setup. And so diving into the mobile side, I was blown away by how much is out there. And the limitations still for mobile tends to be power. So there’s all these great USB microphones that are out these days, but very few of them really work with a mobile device, not for any other reason than just power consumption. So it’s a different set of considerations.

Sean Corbett:
So let’s jump into some specifics, then we were going to maybe, keeping in mind we’re going to try to help the small business owner. Let’s talk both about maybe equipment needed, but also the environment that they record in.

Brett Leonard:
That’s huge. And when people are setting up home offices and home conference rooms, for a long time, it was really oriented on, okay, where’s the computer monitor going to be? What’s the ergonomics of that set up? Am I going to be comfortable working here? Or if I’m a creative, does it inspire my workflow or whatever, but I think there needs to be a huge focus if you’re working remotely or planning on generating content, even if it’s just short web ads or product demos, things like that, to the room. And picking a quiet room is common practice. People think through that usually these days, but then they get into a room that’s generally got three sets of parallel surfaces that are all hard and it’s an acoustic nightmare.

Sean Corbett:
And they sit three feet in front of one of the walls, facing one of the walls talking into it.

Brett Leonard:
Exactly. You’re setting up these back and forth reflections, where sound bounces back and forth until, a lot of times a home office, the person sitting in the office is just about the only absorptive thing acoustically. Maybe there’s a couch. But choosing some plush furniture, if you have that option, if you could put a couch or a love seat, that helps, if you have a carpeted floor. And a lot of this stuff won’t necessarily help with music, but the human voice has a pretty narrow range. And so, even just putting a large carpet down on a wood floor can make a pretty significant improvement.

Sean Corbett:
About a bookshelf with some standard hardcover books? Will that absorb a little bit as well?

Brett Leonard:
It’ll absorb a tiny bit, but what a bookshelf does, which is actually super helpful is, we think about, if you picture the normal bedroom with three sets of parallel surfaces, you’re sitting at your desk and you’re talking towards the wall. That sound bounces back off the wall directly towards you. And then it hits the back wall and bounces directly back and goes back and forth. When you put a bookshelf in the way, now you have a bunch of uneven surfaces, because some books are deeper, some books are taller, some books are wider. So you’ve now broken up that acoustic energy. It’s miraculous how much a change that can make, just having that. And better yet, if you can orient yourself towards that, so you’re not talking at a flat wall, all of a sudden the sound’s going to change.
The other cool thing that I have discovered that’s a total… I stumbled across it. I spend too much time on Amazon. I look at whatever random thing shows up. And usually I don’t buy, but I found it’s become trendy to have these plastic extrusions that are supposed to be decorative wall tiles that have some sort of three dimensional contour to them. Those actually do quite a good job as well. So if you’re trying to keep the place modern looking and give it a little bit of a visual flare, if you’re doing video work, that actually has an acoustic benefit too, because that sound now, rather than bouncing off something flat, it’s hitting all these little ridges and contours and things and it’s scattered.

Sean Corbett:
Oh, interesting. So they found a way basically to work in the egg carton concept visually.

Brett Leonard:
Basically, yeah. And a lot of times they’re one foot by one foot squares. That seems to be the most common size. And you buy a 30 pack of them or something. And so you can just tile them over one wall or you can spread them out. But yeah, it actually looks cool if you are careful in the placement, but then it really makes a difference sound wise. And then on the flip side, there are tons of companies that make acoustical foam, which for the voice range is a really good solution as well, because it just helps absorb a little of that sound. So it’s not coming right back off the wall into your microphone and causing an echo or something like that.

Sean Corbett:
Nice. Okay. And then mic wise, let’s say it’s something that, because a lot of the people here maybe won’t have access to BNH photo in New York where we typically buy our equipment, but let’s say Amazon… Canada have a pretty good selection on Amazon. So let’s pick a mic or two, maybe we could recommend to the small business owner.

Brett Leonard:
If you’re doing something where the visual aspect is either not important or you want to look like you’re talking into a mic, the company Blue makes a number of USB mics, the Yeti and the Snowball are two of the more popular ones that are both really great. And there’s a Japanese company called Audio-Technica that makes everything, from multiple thousands of dollars worth of microphones, very, very high end stuff, all the way down to some really affordable $1 to $200 USB mics that are fantastic. They’re really, bang for the buck wise, they’re hard to beat.

Sean Corbett:
That’s actually a good subpoint.

Brett Leonard:
[inaudible] like the talk show mic.

Sean Corbett:
Right. So it’s going to be visible, that’s right. I actually tell people a lot, just for different marketing clients and stuff, because I encourage a lot of marketing clients to do both audio and video. And I always tell them, it’s not like the late nineties. You don’t have to hide your mic. Everyone knows you’ve got a mic, but don’t worry about it. Because if you’re worried about hiding the mic, that should be super low priority, I think, especially for a small business.
So you mentioned a price range, which was my next question actually. There are, let’s take Audio-Technica, or even Røde for instance, there is such a wide range of prices. And obviously, the small business owner who’s not using it that much isn’t going to want to drop five grand plus. But what would you say is the minimum cost you’d want them to get over, so they know they’re getting decent quality?

Brett Leonard:
If you’re too much below on the microphone side, if you’re much below $100, you might be getting into questionable territory. That $100 to $200 is a really serviceable, desktop microphone range for a USB mic. There are also, one other thing, if you are slightly more concerned about, you don’t want this big mic blocking your face, which is a legitimate concern, Røde also makes a whole series of wireless mics now that are not wireless mics like we might think of them, in a news room or a large film set where there’s racks and tons of gear and antennas everywhere and at this big complicated system.
They’ve really done a good job. They’re size of maybe a couple of triple A batteries. And the batteries are right in the microphone, you clip it on your lapel. And then they have a receiver that you can stick to the back of your phone even, to your mobile device. And that can be a really streamlined way to go too. So there’s a lot of options out there, but I think if you’re spending over $500 on a mic, you’re probably hitting diminishing returns pretty quickly, for just speaking and normal conferencing and video recording use.

Sean Corbett:
Nice. So $100 to $500 is a good range. It’s interesting, you run up that road. I think I know the one you’re thinking of. It’s looks like a little bit of square and you could pin that to your lapel. I have a client that uses that too. And the difference is insane. And one thing I’ve also noticed, and we’re going to veer into video territory now, and you probably see the same thing. When someone who’s not used to shooting video, even if they’re always using their cell phone to film videos for their friends and family, they’ll typically film something and then they’ll pan somewhere else, or they’ll look somewhere else. So they’ll be talking away from the phone, not realizing the mics in the phone. So as soon as you put that Røde lapel mic on, solves that problem right away.

Brett Leonard:
And it’s funny you mentioned that. There’s this real, because when we’re talking to somebody in person, when we’re sitting there, our brain’s really good at picking out what we’re listening to and following it, even if it moves around or we move around. But as soon as you’ve got a cell phone or a computer or a laptop in between the sender and the receiver, our brain no longer gets all those pieces of the information that we need.
So it sounds really stupid, but you’ve just got to remember to talk into the mic and get close to the mic. A lot of these large mics that are desktop USB mics, you still have to be fairly close to them, you can’t put them halfway across the room and expect to get the same quality result you would if it were six inches to a foot in front of you. So, just disciplining yourself to remember that the mic is my friend and use it for all its worth.

Sean Corbett:
Get as close possible. That’s right. That’s the most basic thing and it’s the easiest one to forget.

Brett Leonard:
Especially when you’re excited about something. If you’re introducing a product or you’re talking about an idea that you’re really passionate about. The first thing that goes out the window is getting up close to the mic. It’s just human nature. The first one out the window.

Sean Corbett:
We had another guest on a couple months ago and he’s a professional videographer. And one of the things we talked about, because obviously this is something that matters to me as well, is people don’t realize what they can get away with in terms of crappy video quality. And the audience will interpret it as being authentic, edgy, lo-fi, whatever hilarious reframes that have been done over the years, but you cannot get away with audio that’s hard to hear. Probably this recording will end up being because of my internet connection. It is so fatiguing to listen to hard to hear audio. You can’t even compare it.

Brett Leonard:
There’s a huge psychological effect that people discount, that when your brain has to work hard to understand what somebody’s saying, your desire to continue paying attention plummets almost immediately. So if you’re not hitting that base level of quality, you think you’re putting content out, that’s going to excite your customers or excite your clients. And it really just wears them out and they tune out pretty quickly, which can have the opposite effect very quickly.
So making sure you’re hitting that, everyone’s clearly intelligible, everything’s understandable. That’s where you’ve got to aim, at the very least. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but everyone’s got to hear every word.

Sean Corbett:
Great point. And that actually brings me to one of my last questions, and we’ve covered a few, but I was going to ask you some common misconceptions that people have when it comes to just mics, recording sound. Do I have to do this type of thing at all?

Brett Leonard:
It’s interesting, because a lot of what people think about and know about and the common knowledge and rule of thumb type stuff that comes around about recording and acoustics relates to music. And music represents a huge range of frequencies and a huge range of volumes, signal levels, if you will. And when you’re dealing with voice, a lot of that stuff becomes a lot less important. So there’s this sentiment in the music recording world, that once you’re putting so much money into the home studio, it’s probably not worth it. You should just go to a real studio and rent it. It’s absolutely not true when it comes to voice, because a carpet will make a difference, because some of these Amazon decorative foam or plastic things will make a difference. You can do a lot more for audio content that’s focused only on the voice, fairly cheaply than you can for music.
So I think that’s a really common misconception. The other common misconception is that I spent $3,000 on a laptop, so I shouldn’t need anything else. The audio in most modern devices, including phones, which is extra hilarious to me, because that was literally their sole purpose 20 years ago, was to send and receive audio, it’s the last thing that a lot of manufacturers think about.

Sean Corbett:
Yes.

Brett Leonard:
They’re worried about how fast Facebook will load and how many minutes will it take to render a video on some high end laptop or what’s the 3D rendering on a gaming laptop. And at the end they’re like, “Hey, did anyone tell the audio guys we’re releasing a new device? I don’t know. We’ve got a week. They can figure it out.” Last minute thing.

Sean Corbett:
And then you install the microphone. That’s the size of a pin somewhere in the laptop.

Brett Leonard:
Exactly. Or you install 20 of them and you hope somehow you can hire some poor programmer to try to sort out all the different times of arrival and make the whole thing sound right.

Sean Corbett:
Brett, I would figure that the secret mic that feeds information to the CIA is probably the best mic on the laptop.

Brett Leonard:
Obviously. Priorities. You’ve got to keep that back door open. It’s wild how skimpy some of the audio quality is. And especially modern mobile devices, everyone, when was the time you read the spec sheet of some new iPhone or something and it was like six paragraphs about how great the camera was? And at the bottom it was like, oh yeah, it has a microphone too. It’s adding that front end, that microphone or a good set of headphones on the flip side, just taking that part out of the device usually is the single biggest improvement you can make.

Sean Corbett:
Perfect. So we’ve got the room. People pay attention to the room. Make sure there’s some variance in it. Make sure it’s not all hard surfaces. We’ve got either an Audio-Technica or a RØDE mic, maybe between 100 to 500 bucks. That will probably get most people going.
And the final thing, of course, we glossed over, but you alluded to it, is if you’re recording on your cell phone, you’re going to need a plug that goes probably from USB to whatever your phone receives, right?

Brett Leonard:
Yeah. And most places that are going to sell the mic are going to throw the, “Have you considered this other product?” Usually it’s not too hard to find. For lightning it’s usually lightning to 3.5 millimeter with four zones, a tip ring, ring sleeve. And then that splits out the microphone. And for USBC it’s typically something similar.

Sean Corbett:
Perfect. So they just got to tell, if they’re going out to buy, they’ve got to tell whoever they’re buying from where the mic’s going to plug in and then the salesperson could probably assist them from there.

Brett Leonard:
Yeah. And the nice thing is, those little dongles that go in between are even more common than the microphones themselves, because they get used for a variety of things. So even the local Best Buy or Big-Box retailer typically has those if you need one in a pinch.

Sean Corbett:
That’s awesome. Okay, cool. Brett, why don’t you tell the people where they can find you if they want to know more about your company or just audio in general?

Brett Leonard:
If you want to check out blpaudio.com, you can contact me through there. And that’s just some general background about my company on there. And there’s tons of great resources for audio. YouTube is an amazing resource. There’s a gentleman named Alex Case, who’s based in Boston, who does some great videos that you can find on YouTube. I don’t think he has his own channel. He does it with other people, but great resources there. Just tons of information out there, that if you go looking for acoustic treatments or basic podcasting setups, because a lot of these concepts apply, there’s good stuff online that you can tap into.

Sean Corbett:
Beautiful. Now last word goes to you. Any final thoughts about audio for business?

Brett Leonard:
I think, when you’re on that Zoom call or that Skype call or that Teams call that we’ve all been on where there’s the one person who doesn’t have their audio sorted out, and it takes a lot to take their opinion seriously sometimes because you’re so preoccupied with the degraded audio quality that I think in today’s business world, locking down your audio to hit that minimal acceptable quality is huge. And it can make the difference between, in a virtual world, somebody really paying attention to what you have to say, versus paying attention to the technical issues that surround what you have to say.

Sean Corbett:
Totally. Well said. My friend, thanks for being on here. It’s always good to talk to you again.

Brett Leonard:
My pleasure, my pleasure. Anytime.

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