Six Sound Mistakes in Live and Recorded Programmes, and How to Avoid Them

The most common fault we find is a microphone positioned to suit the look of the set rather than the speaker. A lavalier clipped under a chin catches chest resonance and breath, while a desk microphone parked beside a monitor picks up fan noise and the click of keyboards. In a rush before rehearsal, the stand goes wherever there is space, and nobody returns to it.

The fix is dull but reliable: place the microphone first, then dress the set around it. Keep a lavalier about a hand's width below the chin and clear of jewellery, necklines and scarves. For boom and desk microphones, check the distance from each mouth with the presenter seated in their real posture, not standing at the stand while someone adjusts it.

Walk every position once with headphones on and a presenter reading live copy. Rustle, plosives and room tone show up in the first thirty seconds, long before they show up in a complaint from the control room or the viewer at home.

• Place the microphone before the set dressing is finalised
• Test with the presenter seated in the real posture
• Listen on headphones, not only on the gallery speakers

A mix can sit neatly inside the loudness meter and still sound wrong. We often see levels set by eye, with faders nudged to keep the needle steady while two guests talk over each other and a music bed swallows the quieter voice. The meter tells you about level; it does not tell you whether the audience can follow the conversation.

Start each programme with a clear idea of what must always be intelligible: usually the lead voice, then the guest, then everything else. Set the voices first, bring in effects and music beneath them, and leave headroom for the moments when a guest laughs or raises their voice unexpectedly.

Where a team shares the desk between shows, write the starting fader positions on a short note beside the console. It saves the first ten minutes of every session and removes the argument about whose settings were right last time.

• Decide which voice must always be intelligible
• Set voices first, then music and effects beneath them
• Keep headroom for unplanned laughter and raised voices

When a studio sounds boxy or a live stage rings, the instinct is to reach for equalisation, compression and noise gates until the problem disappears. Stacked together, those tools produce a thin, pumping sound that tires listeners and still carries the original fault underneath, because the cause is in the room or the microphone choice.

Treat the source before the signal. A hard reflective wall behind a presenter, a bare table surface or an air-conditioning duct close to a boom will all be cheaper to fix with absorption, a rug or a moved microphone than with another plug-in or hardware insert.

Where processing is needed, use light touches and name each one in the channel notes. If a colleague cannot tell why a gate or filter is switched on, it is probably masking something that should have been dealt with at the source.

Teams often mix entirely on the speakers they know best and never check anywhere else. The result is a programme that sounds fine in the gallery and poor on a phone, a television in a kitchen or a hall system at a live event. Familiarity with a monitoring chain can hide its weaknesses for years.

Keep a short routine for checking a mix: full-range speakers, a small speaker standing in for domestic sets, and headphones for detail. Switching between them for a minute at the start of transmission costs almost nothing and catches the faults that only appear on one of them.

For live events, listen in the room as well as in the control position. Delay between the stage, the house speakers and the broadcast feed can make a mix feel correct to the engineer and confusing to everyone else.

• Check on full-range, small and headphone monitoring
• Listen in the room as well as in the control position
• Note any delay between stage, house and broadcast feeds

Programme sound gets the attention while the communication around it is left as a collection of leftovers. Talkback that bleeds into the presenter's earpiece, an unlabelled return mix or a producer's voice leaking onto air are all avoidable, yet they appear in the incident reports of many productions.

Give talkback its own routing and name each return clearly on the desk and at the patch point. Agree who may speak to the talent, and when, so that three people do not press the button at once during a live link.

Check earpiece levels with the presenter before every show, not just at installation. A return that was comfortable in rehearsal can be painfully loud once a crowd arrives or a guest changes the rhythm of the conversation.

Many sound problems are not technical at all. A morning crew leaves a desk in one state, an evening crew inherits it, and nobody wrote down which microphones were swapped, which channels were muted on purpose or which filter was added to cure a hum in the ceiling.

A one-page note kept at the desk is enough. It should list the channel layout, any known faults and their workarounds, and the settings that must not be changed without asking. Review it whenever equipment moves or a new presenter joins.

This is the habit we recommend most often during workflow reviews, because it costs nothing and protects every other practice in this article. Good microphones and careful mixing are easily undone by a crew who cannot see what the last crew decided.

• List channel layout and known faults
• Mark settings that must not change without asking
• Review the note whenever equipment or presenters change