A Checklist for Judging Room Sound Before You Commit

Rooms carry sound you stop noticing after five minutes. A ventilation fan, a humming transformer, traffic on the harbour road, a corridor with a heavy door. A microphone has no such habit of tuning things out, and a live broadcast gives you no second take to remove it afterwards.

Record a minute of the empty room with the equipment you plan to use and play it back on headphones. Whatever you hear in that minute will be under every word of the programme. Some of it can be switched off for the duration of the show, some can be reduced by moving a source or a microphone, and some means choosing another time of day.

Ask who else uses the building and when. A venue that is quiet at ten in the morning may not be at four, and a rehearsal should be held at the hour of the broadcast so you hear the real conditions.

Treatment does not have to mean covering every wall. The aim is to control the reflections that reach the microphones and to stop the room adding its own voice. Often a small number of well-placed panels behind the cameras, a rug or soft flooring under the set, and curtains on the worst reflective surface make the largest difference.

Ask what problem each piece of treatment is meant to solve and where it will sit. Panels hung where no microphone benefits from them are an expense and nothing more. Think too about the cameras: absorbers must stay out of shot, and anything near a lighting position has to be safe around heat.

Decide whether the treatment is permanent or needs to be taken down after each use. A hired venue and a dedicated studio call for very different answers, and portable screens can be a sensible middle path for a space you do not own.

The right microphone is the one that suits the voice, the room and the way the person moves. A presenter who sits still behind a desk can use a different arrangement from a guest who gestures and turns. Lapel microphones are discreet but pick up clothing noise and chest resonance, while boom and desk microphones sound more natural but must sit close and stay out of the picture.

Distance matters more than price. A modest microphone placed correctly will beat an expensive one placed carelessly. Check that each person has a clear, consistent distance from their microphone and that nothing, such as a paper pile or a laptop, sits between them.

For music, think about how many sources compete for the same space and whether the stage sound is already loud enough to bleed into every open microphone. Plan the layout on paper before the day, not at the sound check.

A live mix is made in real time, so the person doing it needs to hear what the audience will hear. That means decent monitoring in a quiet enough space, not a pair of headphones in a noisy gallery. Agree who is responsible for sound and who they take instructions from, so that a producer's request in the middle of a programme does not arrive from three directions.

Think about what happens when something fails. A dead radio microphone, a battery that gives out, a cable pulled loose by a passing foot. Keep a spare in reach, label every channel clearly, and decide in advance which source takes over if the main one is lost.

Finally, listen back to a recording of the rehearsal before the broadcast. Problems that go unnoticed in the room are often plain on a recording, and there is still time to correct them.