An Open Letter To The Guys & Gals Doing Audio For TV

C’mon – I know the broadcast networks can certainly afford subwoofers for their audio control rooms. And someone has to be getting paid to properly set up the audio control room, right?

I also can’t think of a single console that doesn’t include some form of high-pass filter after the mic preamplifier, and Shure makes barrel connectors with 80 Hz filters that can easily be inserted before the mic preamp.

There’s just no excuse for high-dollar productions on this scale to provide worse audio than a local access cable channel broadcasting high school basketball games. As consumers, I don’t think it’s out of line to expect the “audio for video” gurus of the news world to care a little bit… just a little bit.

The complexities of getting multitudes of live audio feeds to the right place is intense, and the generally fast-pace/high-stress gig of mixing live television can indeed be stressful. But it doesn’t seem like a lot to ask that an extra 3-4 seconds per channel be taken in order to drop in filtering that will make a world of difference.

While it may be news, it’s also still “entertainment”. So how about enhancing the entertainment factor of every program – instead of the annoyance/distraction factor?