Episode: 3345
Title: HPR3345: Audio for Podcasting: Episode 2 - Equalization
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3345/hpr3345.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 21:12:04

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,345 for Friday, 28th of May 2021.
Tid's show is entitled, Audio for Podcasting, Episode 2 Equalization.
It is hosted by Finch Serif and is about 16 minutes long and carries an explicit flag.
The summary is Finch Shares Tips and tricks on producing quality audio for HPR episodes.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
Let's get Hacker Public Radio.
This is Taj again and we're going to do the second in the series on Audio Quality.
We begin with microphones which are sort of the beginning of the signal chain and now we're
going to move up to processing.
I'm going to split the processing up into a couple of different things but today we're
going to focus on equalization that really is the beginning of fine tweaking and I'll be honest
it's a little bit of a black art but some broad strokes will give you a lot of control
to be able to do a couple of things to make it sound better and I'm going to actually
reference some material from other people so it's not just me speaking but really this is
all things that are pretty clearly echoed in the audio community so you're not going to hear
anything here that you won't find if you just Google the subject.
Also at this very beginning part of the episode this is audio that has been processed.
This goes through sort of my normal signal chain that I used to record and a little bit of
post processing. After this point of the show I'm going to use some samples that are not processed
and then I'm going to make slight changes so you can kind of hear what each change does.
So you understand what knobs you can tweak to get different kinds of sounds.
Really that is the way to learn this. You can read lots of material on equalization but really
playing with the knobs and hearing it yourself really is the way to learn it. You can use lots of
terminology to describe how a sound is affected by equalization but it's almost like when you hear
somebody talk about wine or something like that and they're using all these adjectives that don't
really have a meaning. They kind of point in the right direction but they're not exactly
the sensation that you're getting. Having the experience or sensation of doing this will really
help. Thankfully like I said audacity has all the tools we need to do some some equalization.
So what I would suggest for people is just take an audio sample of something that you've recorded,
put it in audacity and just start playing with the knobs until you get something that sounds good.
Okay with that being said I'm going to reference the first sort of outside article that I want to
talk about and this article was posted a few years back and it's by a man named Sean Fox. He is
the senior director for audio engineering at NPR and NPR's National Public Radio for people in the
United States. It is our national public radio and it's known for having a certain sound and
this was an interview where he was interviewed and he was talking about how they achieved that sound
and it really is through equalization mostly. A choice of mic and equalization. So I'm going to
attach a link to the article in the show notes to this but really what he describes is the way to
get that HPR sound is rolling the bass off which basically means taking the equalization and rolling
off everything. He says below about 250 hertz. When you look at an equalization graph it goes across
a pretty big spectrum and when we get into there we'll look at it but basically below 250 hertz is
all the really low stuff. Now you'll notice that that is it makes some changes that I'm not a huge
fan of. I do like rolling down the bass. I don't like rolling it all the way out but it does help
punch through noise and the reason that they do that at NPR is because they assume that people are
listening in the car and there's a lot of background noise in a car. A lot of that tends to be low
end so people aren't going to hear that. I would argue that HPR may be fairly similar. I know I'd
listen to it in the car so you know mileage may vary. It will definitely give your sound a little
bit more of a high-end punch so it can get over noise. So that's one of the things that's
recommended in that article. There's lots of other things. Some of it echoes what I said in the
last episode but really that's the big takeaway. So what I'm going to do from here is I'm going to
kind of switch my configuration so I'm just putting in straight audio with no no fixes just
basically from my mic into the computer and then we'll take that sample and we'll play around with
it and see what we can do with EQ. This is sample audio. This is audio to test equalization.
Listening to this should give you an idea of what the changes you have made have done.
Okay so just looking at that you can probably already tell that it's a little softer and a little
more flattened out and basically all I did was I took out all of the EQ that I normally use. I do it
through my hardware mixer but you can use the tools that are inside audacity to do the same thing.
And so I just took all that out so there's really no peaks or valleys to my sound. It's very flat.
So what we're going to do is I'm going to run that same sample again but this time I'm going to roll
out the base just like Mr. Fox said in his article and so you can kind of see what that does to the sound.
This is sample audio. This is audio to test equalization. Listening to this should give you an idea
of what the changes you have made have done. Okay from that sample you can probably hear a drastic change.
The difference to me if I was going to describe it it sounds a little more hollow.
It has it just doesn't have depth. So let's talk about how you would make this change when you're
using audacity and like I said I'm going to stick with audacity because it's free and it is quite
simply the simplest tool to use for this kind of audio editing. So you're going to go up to the top
to the menu bar and you would hit effects. When you come down there's going to be one called
graphic EQ and that's what we're going to use because it literally has everything you need to
see as one big spectrum. So an equalizer takes the entire spectrum of sound that we're going to use in
this. There's more spectrums of sound than what is in a typical audio environment but these are the
ones we're going to deal with. It goes all the way from 20 hertz up to 20,000 hertz. So it's a big range.
The lower the numbers are the lower the frequency. The higher the numbers and the higher the frequency.
As you move the slider up you're going to get more of that frequency as you pull it down. You're
going to get less kind of makes sense. So for that what I did is I opened the graphic equalizer
and everything from 200 hertz down. I just as you wrote out. So you get that sort of hollow sound from
there being no base. You can also kind of see why that would punch through noise because a lot of
that background information isn't there. It does in my opinion damage the sound but I will say that
typically when recording I do take out some base frequencies. I wouldn't pull that all the way down
like even right now. I may pull them down about 20 percent from flat and it does sort of punch up
your sound a little bit. So now that we've done that I'm going to take my flat example that we
had at the beginning and I'm going to let's base boost. So let's add in all of the base and see
what that does to it. This is sample audio. This is audio to test equalization. Listening to this
should give you an idea of what the changes you have made have done. Okay so again it should be
very apparent the sound change. To me I think that lots of base sounds very stuffy and it's something
I try to eliminate for my own voice because I know my speaking voice tends to be a little stuffy
and head voicey. So this was basically doing the exact opposite on the graphic EQ. I took all of
the sliders that I had at zero and I cranked them all the way to the top. So you know flat is in
the middle and you can adjust this to your taste. Like I said I typically roll out a little bit
because I think it's too much at that flat level. Your mileage may vary. I will say that
in sort of more modern contexts people do tend to prefer a lot of base in things. I think that's
a mistake. I think it muddies up and doesn't give things clarity that they need. But I think some
people's initial gut reaction is to add more base. I would caution you against that. In general
what I would caution you with an EQ is don't think about boosting things really think about taking
away leaving your EQ at that flat section as the highest and then pull out. If you start going
above that and you start boosting everything you you play this game of diminishing returns where
you're just boosting boosting boosting and there's no nowhere to go. You kind of gone to the top.
If you pull out you have some room to work. Okay so now that we've played with the low end I want
to play with the mids which is sort of the middle section basically kind of from that 250 up a
little bit and we'll see what that does to the sound. This is sample audio. This is audio to test
equalization. Listening to this should give you an idea of what the changes you have made have done.
Okay so in that example what I did is I went from about 250 up to about 1K. There's some argument
as to what mid range exactly is but to me that's sort of in my head what mid range is in that case
I pulled all of it out so you could kind of hear what that sounds like to me it sounds again thin
sort of doesn't have any warmth to it sounds very cold and this tends to be a place that people
struggle with. Mids are so much of what our sound is as a person and when you take it out it almost
sounds a little robotic so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do the same thing again but I'm gonna
add the mids and push them all the way up. This is sample audio. This is audio to test equalization.
Listening to this should give you an idea of what the changes you have made have done. So you can
see when you add lots of mids to me it sounds very the best adjective I have for it is kind of
hunky kind of sounds like you're talking to your nose the whole time that's not very desirable
and it kind of washes out the the pauses and the breaks and what you're saying it makes it hard
to understand it a lot of times in my opinion the two things that make things very unintelligible
are too much base or too too much in the mids now just for an example of what I'm doing right now
what you're hearing is I tend to boost the mids just a little bit not much and I kind of fine-tune
it a little bit I know with my voice because you know I've worked with it a long time I know that
the 250 hurts range is actually kind of bad so I will duck that down below and I will boost some
of the others just a little bit to make up for that and it it sort of lets my audio cut a little
better I I feel like it's more intelligible in different places so you know you're my
literal very on that you're gonna have to play with the sliders for you but I will reiterate what
I said earlier the mids really are to me kind of the soul of your sound you definitely want to
take a lot of time in that mids range to very carefully construct the sounds you want okay so the
last thing we have left are the highs this is going to be everything above that I'm going to do
one sample and I'm just going to do these back-to-back so you can kind of hear them I'll do one with
everything cut out and one with everything put in in the highs and basically this is going to be
everything from one k up this is sample audio this is audio to test equalization listening to this
should give you an idea of what the changes you have made have done this is sample audio
this is audio to test equalization listen to this should give you an idea of what the changes you
have made have done okay so you can see that the highs the high frequencies have a huge impact
This is the one that I tweak the least because it has the most effect, at least to my ear.
My personal preference is I do tweak and boost just a little bit on the high end, especially
the very high end.
Once again, for me, that makes it sound a little more punchy and it helps with the enunciation
and things like that.
Sometimes I get comments that I don't boost that enough or that I boost my mids too high
and it kind of washes out my highs.
That really is something that I want to stress is this really is so subjective that what
you think sounds good to your own voice is maybe not the best, maybe have somebody else
listen to it.
But you can read a million books on equalization and, you know, articles of what exactly
to do.
And the reality is that it's really going to be dependent on your voice.
Now, once you kind of figure out what you want your sound to be, how you want your
voice to sound, you can set up a preset inside that graphic equalizer.
After panel, you can make a preset to where all you have to do is every time you load
in your voice into audacity.
So if I record something, I just load it in, I drop that effect on it and use that preset.
So I never have to worry about it again.
It's right there every time.
I don't have to fiddle with this over and over and over again.
You just take some time the first time to adjust it and then it's always there for you.
So this is a thing that, you know, like I said, I spent some time doing it originally
on my voice.
And I've done that, especially with you random, there's occasions where I will have to
EQ things for my co-host that are a little different for their voices, although that's
not very common.
We all use mixers.
So we've kind of worked on that in the pre-processing stage.
It can in the signal chain, it goes from the mic to the mixer into the computer.
But occasionally I will have to make some tweaks, but really for the most part, this is kind
of set it and forget it once you get it.
Again, if you're recording on your phone directly uploading, this probably isn't going
to be that helpful because I'm not aware of tools that will let you have this fine of
control over your EQ sound going out as a recording.
I may be wrong.
That's just an area of expertise that I don't have.
But I would say that if you take the time to do this, you're going to get a huge benefit
out of your sound.
Most of the time, and you can probably already tell by listening to those samples, so for
example, I have a, I use my phone to record one of my podcasts.
It is very, very mid-heavy and very base heavy.
So for that, I have to EQ it to make it sound good or at least to sound intelligible.
So it's things like that that you just kind of need to know the circumstances of what
you're doing and the tools you're using and adapt to them.
So that's really all there is to equalization.
There's not a whole lot more.
You can do it on a mixer with knobs where you can do it in software.
I would say that for most people doing it through software is the easiest.
Every install of Audacity has that graphic EQ package in the effects you should use
that to play around.
With that being said, I will catch you guys next time and we'll probably, I think I'm
going to take some recordings from less than ideal situations and walk you through what
I would do to them.
That way you kind of get an idea of how to use some of these tools like EQ and some other
tools that we're going to talk about to get your sound to be a little bit better.
Until then, see you later.
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