How to improve telephone audio for a webinar

[Ty Ford]

Sometimes high fidelity takes a back seat to content. In this case, a company that does a webinar series asked for my help in cleaning up and streamlining their audio. I heard their previous webcast and, wow was it bad! Way too much data compression. Intelligibility was suffering. Surely I could do better.

I was asked to record the panelists in different cities in advance of the event, sequence their audio with other voice recordings and create a master .wav file that would be the bulk of the presentation. There would be a live Q&A and a pre-recorded good bye. The webinar would run a little less than an hour. I was also hired to be on site for the show to help the producer.

There are lots of ways to get audio off a phone line. Perhaps the easiest is a phone hybrid and I just happened to have a JK AutoHybrid in my bag of tricks. The phone line plugs into the hybrid and although it has XLR in and out, it has no level adjustments.

Between the hybrid and Pro Tools, I put a Sound Devices MixPre-D so that I could adjust levels as needed. I could have used the MixPre-D's USB out to get into the computer, but chose my RME ADI-8 DS A/D converter. It uses ADAT optical to get into my Digidesign DIGI003R.

In this particular situation, my voice would not be heard so I only used the hybrid as a way to grab the phone audio and bring it into the Pro Audio world. I called each interviewee first to make sure they had a line that sounded good enough. One was on a cell phone and the audio was pretty messy, but she was able to get to a hard line.

A "hard line", BTW is, historically, a copper connection consisting of an overhead or underground pair of wires that bring the phone service into your home or office. Copper is an expensive, aging infrastructure in the USA. As the lines and insulation deteriorate, water from rain seeps in and compromises the connection. Bugs, birds and squirrels also do their unknowing best to destroy the system. The result is a noisy phone line.

Copper lines have worked well over the years, digging into a bundle of copper cables to find problem pairs and fix them is expensive and time consuming. Where ever possible, copper is being replaced by fiber optic cable. Fiber optic cable offers many advantages, but can also be physically compromised.

While the number of analog conversations coming down a copper pair is normally limited to one single conversation, fiber optic lines with digital audio can accommodate many more. That makes fiber optic delivery more economical for the phone companies once they suck up the cost of replacing the copper. Using data compression, the phone companies can fit even more conversations on the line, but as they increase the number of conversations, the fidelity of each one deteriorates. Think of what happens to CD audio when you make low bit rate mp3 files for your personal music device.

You're also aware of this phenomenon on today's cell phones; mushy, swishy artifacts that sometimes make the conversation difficult or impossible to understand. Although we forget, analog cell phones sounded a lot better. My point here is that, these days, phones that plug into a wall may not be hard lines. In some cases, a good cell phone on a good day may sound better than a bad home or office phone on a bad day. If the problem is not in the telephone instruments themselves, sometimes just hanging up and recalling can result in a better connection because the call will be routed through a different path in the communications maze.

We thought to try SKYPE. I've used it in the past and have been very pleased with the quality of the audio, but unless the user has a headset that allows them to have the mic very close and a headphone to keep the computer audio from getting back into the mic, the results can be ugly. And, not all phone headsets are the same; some sound pretty good, others simply suck. The participants were not phone ranger types so I tried to make things as simple as possible.

After a quick call to each person to determine if the connection was good, I was satisfied that each person's phone would do the job, I made appointments for a short interview; about 20 minutes each. The recordings went off without surprise, but I did have to remember to mute my own phone from the phone handset when I recorded them to keep my voice and any noise out of the track.

After editing, I applied parametric EQ and iZotope RX3 Advanced Noise Reduction and Dereverb. I used Pro Tools' stock 7 band parametric EQ to scrape off any low or high frequency junk and to enhance the voice.

Seven bands provides a lot of sound shaping ability. The interface is quick and intuitive. Sometimes the voice would sound a bit thin. I used the EQ to add some upper bass or low midrange to warm the voice up. If the voice is a bit dull, adding energy around 3 kHz to 6 kHz will bring it back to life and dragging the points around in real time while hearing the changes works very well.

The powerful noise reduction in RX3 pulled some of the various low level noise out of the recording and it also got rid of a lot of the ringing artifacts you hear on phone audio. Dereverb reduced the echo that frequently accompanies phone audio these days. That echo is pretty tight and at first I didn't really think much about there being an echo. After I inserted the plugin, I was surprised by how much it was taking out, and without further damaging the audio. No, the result was not studio quality, but it was obviously better than what I started with.

I put a compressor followed by a limiter in the Pro Tools two-mix to pack the audio; just enough to make it thick. At that point, I attached my Sound Devices 664 mixer/recorder to my Digidesign DIGI 003R and recorded my mix onto the 664. An odd choice perhaps, but the MacBook and webinar software I was using required external audio coming into a MacBook. The 664 makes a very nice playback device. A bit overkill, perhaps, but very solid. The client was very happy.

Technique, Inc. © Copyright 2014 All Rights Reserved

Contact Ty Ford at www.tyford.com

[Greg Miller]

Yes, it can be a lot of work to get passable audio out of a telephone circuit. You can hear marginal telephone audio on the networks every day. It's commendable that you had the knowledge, patience, and equipment to give it a go.

My favorite solution works only if you're producing a copy for later distribution, and if the remote talent is a little bit tech savvy and has the right equipment. Obviously that is not always the case (sometimes you are concerned only with a real-time streaming event, not with producing a copy for viewing later), so this is something of a "special case" solution. Just get the talent to make a local recording (from their headset mic, for example) while the interview or teleconference is going on. Then have them save that file and submit it (after the event) e.g. as an EMail attachment. Open that file and you should have a recording of the talent made without the telephone circuit in the audio chain. Of course if you're assembling a video conference for later distribution you'll spend a little time to sync it up, but perhaps less time than it would take to clean up the audio from each of the remote locations.

I'm sure other people have used the same procedure described above. Yours certainly is a more universal solution, and doesn't require anything special at the remote sites ... no special hardware, software, or technical competence. You provide all of those at the production end.

[Seth Bloombaum]

I've often thought about getting good Skype by supplying USB headsets to interviewees. If it's a good bandwidth connection this would usually cover all the bases.

Never did get around to evaluating USB headsets for the purpose. Reccomendations?

[Richard Crowley]

I really like the Logitech H800 wireless headset.
Native Bluetooth interface to computer OR PHONE
ALSO USB wireless using provided USB plug.
tiny USB plug stored in a custom cavity inside the headphones.
Long lasting battery life. USB chargable. Replacable (custom) battery.
Very good audio quality for the price (remarkably good headphones)
They fold up into a compact space.

Street price $50-80
I like it so much, I have bought several.
Logitech.com ? Wireless Headset H800

[Seth Bloombaum]

Originally Posted by Richard Crowley

I really like the Logitech H800 wireless headset...

How is the mic quality?

I use a Logitech wired USB headset that sounds fine, but the mic is extra-crispy. Fine for skype, not so good for remotely recording interviews...

[Richard Crowley]

Call me and you can hear for yourself. 503-869-1741
We can experiment with a cell phone recording, and then with Skype.

[Rob Neidig]

We did a podcast series for a couple of years using Skype to record our expert and his one guest per show. Both were in remote locations so we recorded it using Skype. The Logitech headsets work really well. Skype, however, is a bit hit or miss. Most of the time the audio quality is really pretty good, considering you are not having to pay for an ISDN line or studio time, etc. There are times, though, when the quality level will drop. It seemed that some of our guests using cheap laptops on spotty wireless connections were the main problem. We would occasionally get drop outs in the audio, and you have to be careful that your presenters aren't rattling their headsets all the time and creating a cacophony of rumbles and bangs. A lot of the little drop outs or noises can be edited out, but it does take a little time.

Have fun!

Rob

[Richard Crowley]

We also saw quite variable performance from Skype.
We ended up switching to Google Hangouts.

[Seth Bloombaum]

Originally Posted by Richard Crowley

Call me and you can hear for yourself.
We can experiment with a cell phone recording, and then with Skype.

Going nutz here prepping for a shoot tomorrow, but will try you on Friday - thanks!

Originally Posted by Richard Crowley

We also saw quite variable performance from Skype.
We ended up switching to Google Hangouts.

Also very interesting. I did attend a multipoint video hangout a couple months ago, but haven't really looked closely at it. Guess I should