{"course":{"slug":"motion-and-audio","title":"Motion, Sound and Music","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/motion-and-audio","level":"intermediate","track":"create"},"lesson":{"slug":"sound-is-half-the-picture","title":"People forgive a soft picture and leave over bad sound","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/motion-and-audio/sound-is-half-the-picture","position":47,"of":72,"minutes":10,"answer":"Distance and soft furnishings set the ratio of voice to room; the microphone's price is not on that list.","keyIdea":"Distance and soft furnishings set the ratio of voice to room; the microphone's price is not on that list."},"body":{"format":"markdown","text":"## People forgive a soft picture and leave over bad sound\n\nWatch any two videos on a phone speaker. The one shot on an old camera with clean audio holds you. The one shot beautifully with the microphone across the room does not, and you will not be able to say exactly why you closed it.\n\nGrain and softness read as authenticity. Bad sound reads as effort: the listener is doing continuous work to reconstruct words from a smeared signal, and that work is tiring in a way that has nothing to do with taste. They leave before they consciously decide to.\n\nIf you have limited time, spend it on the sound. This is the least glamorous advice in the course and the most reliably true.\n\n## The room beats the microphone\n\nA microphone picks up two things: the sound travelling straight from your mouth, and the same sound arriving late after bouncing off walls, floor, ceiling, desk and window.\n\nDirect sound weakens quickly with distance: roughly 6 dB for every doubling. Reflected sound barely weakens at all, because it arrives from everywhere at once. So the ratio of clean voice to room is set by two things: how close you are, and how reflective the room is. The microphone's price is not on that list.\n\nThis is why a four-hundred-dollar microphone at one metre in a tiled kitchen sounds worse than a phone at twenty centimetres under a duvet. It is the single most useful fact in beginner audio, and it costs nothing to act on.\n\n### Distance and angle\n\n- About a fist's width from your mouth: 15 to 20 cm.\n- Slightly off to the side, maybe 30 degrees, so the blast of air from p and b sounds passes the capsule rather than hitting it. A sock over a wire coat hanger works as a pop filter if you want one.\n- Directional microphones get bassier the closer you get. That is the proximity effect. Some people like it; you can roll it off later.\n\n### The cheapest real improvement is soft mass\n\nNot acoustic foam. Soft, thick, heavy things.\n\nA duvet, a blanket, a full wardrobe of hanging clothes, a bed, curtains, a sofa, a rug. Put them on the surfaces facing you and facing the microphone: the wall behind the microphone and the wall behind you matter most. Bare parallel walls and a hard floor are what you are fighting.\n\nRecording inside a wardrobe with clothes in it is not a joke. It is the standard budget vocal booth, and it beats most treated rooms for a single voice.\n\nHere is the reason it matters so much: **reverb cannot be fixed afterwards.** Noise reduction works by learning the pattern of a steady, unchanging sound and subtracting it. Reverb is not a separate sound to subtract: it is your own voice arriving a few milliseconds late, with the same frequencies. De-reverb tools have improved a great deal and still leave a hollow, gated quality on anything heavy. Solve it by moving closer and adding soft mass, not by processing.\n\n## Levels, phones and room tone\n\n### Levels\n\nRecord so the loudest peaks land around −12 to −6 dBFS. Not near zero.\n\nDigital clipping is not the warm saturation of analogue tape. It is a flat square edge where the waveform should have been, and nothing recovers it. A recording that is too quiet can be raised. A clipped one cannot be repaired. If your recorder offers 32-bit float, this problem largely disappears; but assume it does not until you have checked.\n\n### Recording on a phone\n\nMost readers of this will do exactly that, and it works.\n\n- Use a voice recorder app that saves at a decent bitrate rather than recording video and taking the audio from it.\n- The microphones are usually on the bottom edge. Do not put your hand over them.\n- Airplane mode, so a radio burst does not appear in the file as a buzz.\n- Fridge off, fan off, window shut. Then record thirty seconds and listen on headphones before you commit to a take.\n- Put a folded towel under the phone so desk knocks do not travel into it.\n- In a large or echoey room, a wired earbud microphone held at chest height often beats the phone's own microphone, purely because it is closer to your mouth.\n\nCheap lavalier microphones are good value. Their failure is cloth rustle: tape the cable in a small loop as strain relief, and keep it clear of collars and jacket zips.\n\n### Record room tone, every time\n\nThirty seconds of the room with nobody speaking, at the same levels, in the same position. It sounds like nothing. It is not nothing: the next two lessons both depend on it, and the moment you need it, going back to record it is impossible because the room has changed.\n\n## Ten minutes today\n\nRecord the same sentence twice: once at arm's length in your normal room, once at twenty centimetres with a coat draped over your head and the microphone. Listen to both on the worst speaker you own. You will not need the rest of this argument."},"check":{"question":"Someone replaces their phone with a $400 microphone but records in the same tiled kitchen, standing a metre back. The result sounds worse than their old phone recordings made 20 cm from their mouth. Why?","options":[{"text":"At a metre the direct sound has dropped substantially while the reflections have not, so the ratio of clean voice to room has worsened. Distance and room reflectivity set that ratio, not microphone quality.","correct":true},{"text":"The new microphone has a wider pickup pattern than the phone's and is collecting sound from the whole room.","correct":false,"tempting":"Attributes a distance problem to the microphone's specification rather than to where it was placed."},{"text":"The recording level is too low for the new microphone, and raising the gain will bring the voice forward.","correct":false,"tempting":"Treats level as the issue, when raising gain lifts the voice and the room by exactly the same amount."},{"text":"It is fixable in post: a noise reduction pass will subtract the room and leave the voice.","correct":false,"tempting":"Expects a tool that learns a steady noise profile to remove reverb, which is the speaker's own voice arriving late."}]},"prev":{"slug":"what-a-microphone-measures","title":"Pressure, gradient, and everything that follows","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/motion-and-audio/what-a-microphone-measures"},"next":{"slug":"the-room-not-the-mic","title":"Direct sound, reverberant sound, and the distance between them","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/motion-and-audio/the-room-not-the-mic"},"authorship":"Founder and series editor: Dr Mustafa Mun. Written by AI models to a written standard. Exam keys checked blind by a second model: 3,665 of 3,666 agreed. Academic review invited.","review":{"status":"Draft, open for academic review"},"cite":"Addaly (2026) 'People forgive a soft picture and leave over bad sound', in Motion, Sound and Music. Edited by M. Mun. Addaly. Available at: https://addaly.com/learn/motion-and-audio/sound-is-half-the-picture (Accessed: 31 October 2026).","licence":{"name":"CC BY-NC-SA 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"},"reader":{"schema":1,"title":"People forgive a soft picture and leave over bad sound","courseTitle":"Motion, Sound and Music","module":{"index":6,"slug":"capturing-sound","title":"Capturing sound"},"answer":null,"keyIdea":"Distance and soft furnishings set the ratio of voice to room; the microphone’s price is not on that list.","hero":{"kind":"plate","image":null,"alt":null,"caption":null},"blocks":[{"t":"h2","id":"people-forgive-a-soft-picture-and-leave-over-bad-sound","runs":[{"text":"People forgive a soft picture and leave over bad sound"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Watch any two videos on a phone speaker. The one shot on an old camera with clean audio holds you. The one shot beautifully with the microphone across the room does not, and you will not be able to say exactly why you closed it."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Grain and softness read as authenticity. Bad sound reads as effort: the listener is doing continuous work to reconstruct words from a smeared signal, and that work is tiring in a way that has nothing to do with taste. They leave before they consciously decide to."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"If you have limited time, spend it on the sound. This is the least glamorous advice in the course and the most reliably true."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-room-beats-the-microphone","runs":[{"text":"The room beats the microphone"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A microphone picks up two things: the sound travelling straight from your mouth, and the same sound arriving late after bouncing off walls, floor, ceiling, desk and window."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Direct sound weakens quickly with distance: roughly 6 dB for every doubling. Reflected sound barely weakens at all, because it arrives from everywhere at once. So the ratio of clean voice to room is set by two things: how close you are, and how reflective the room is. The microphone’s price is not on that list."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"This is why a four-hundred-dollar microphone at one metre in a tiled kitchen sounds worse than a phone at twenty centimetres under a duvet. It is the single most useful fact in beginner audio, and it costs nothing to act on."}]},{"t":"h3","id":"distance-and-angle","runs":[{"text":"Distance and angle"}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"About a fist’s width from your mouth: 15 to 20 cm."}],[{"text":"Slightly off to the side, maybe 30 degrees, so the blast of air from p and b sounds passes the capsule rather than hitting it. A sock over a wire coat hanger works as a pop filter if you want one."}],[{"text":"Directional microphones get bassier the closer you get. That is the proximity effect. Some people like it; you can roll it off later."}]]},{"t":"h3","id":"the-cheapest-real-improvement-is-soft-mass","runs":[{"text":"The cheapest real improvement is soft mass"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Not acoustic foam. Soft, thick, heavy things."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A duvet, a blanket, a full wardrobe of hanging clothes, a bed, curtains, a sofa, a rug. Put them on the surfaces facing you and facing the microphone: the wall behind the microphone and the wall behind you matter most. Bare parallel walls and a hard floor are what you are fighting."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Recording inside a wardrobe with clothes in it is not a joke. It is the standard budget vocal booth, and it beats most treated rooms for a single voice."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Here is the reason it matters so much: "},{"text":"reverb cannot be fixed afterwards.","b":true},{"text":" Noise reduction works by learning the pattern of a steady, unchanging sound and subtracting it. Reverb is not a separate sound to subtract: it is your own voice arriving a few milliseconds late, with the same frequencies. De-reverb tools have improved a great deal and still leave a hollow, gated quality on anything heavy. Solve it by moving closer and adding soft mass, not by processing."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"levels-phones-and-room-tone","runs":[{"text":"Levels, phones and room tone"}]},{"t":"h3","id":"levels","runs":[{"text":"Levels"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Record so the loudest peaks land around −12 to −6 dBFS. Not near zero."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Digital clipping is not the warm saturation of analogue tape. It is a flat square edge where the waveform should have been, and nothing recovers it. A recording that is too quiet can be raised. A clipped one cannot be repaired. If your recorder offers 32-bit float, this problem largely disappears; but assume it does not until you have checked."}]},{"t":"h3","id":"recording-on-a-phone","runs":[{"text":"Recording on a phone"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Most readers of this will do exactly that, and it works."}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"Use a voice recorder app that saves at a decent bitrate rather than recording video and taking the audio from it."}],[{"text":"The microphones are usually on the bottom edge. Do not put your hand over them."}],[{"text":"Airplane mode, so a radio burst does not appear in the file as a buzz."}],[{"text":"Fridge off, fan off, window shut. Then record thirty seconds and listen on headphones before you commit to a take."}],[{"text":"Put a folded towel under the phone so desk knocks do not travel into it."}],[{"text":"In a large or echoey room, a wired earbud microphone held at chest height often beats the phone’s own microphone, purely because it is closer to your mouth."}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Cheap lavalier microphones are good value. Their failure is cloth rustle: tape the cable in a small loop as strain relief, and keep it clear of collars and jacket zips."}]},{"t":"h3","id":"record-room-tone-every-time","runs":[{"text":"Record room tone, every time"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Thirty seconds of the room with nobody speaking, at the same levels, in the same position. It sounds like nothing. It is not nothing: the next two lessons both depend on it, and the moment you need it, going back to record it is impossible because the room has changed."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"ten-minutes-today","runs":[{"text":"Ten minutes today"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Record the same sentence twice: once at arm’s length in your normal room, once at twenty centimetres with a coat draped over your head and the microphone. Listen to both on the worst speaker you own. You will not need the rest of this argument."}]}],"check":{"question":[{"text":"Someone replaces their phone with a $400 microphone but records in the same tiled kitchen, standing a metre back. The result sounds worse than their old phone recordings made 20 cm from their mouth. Why?"}],"options":[{"text":[{"text":"At a metre the direct sound has dropped substantially while the reflections have not, so the ratio of clean voice to room has worsened. Distance and room reflectivity set that ratio, not microphone quality."}],"correct":true,"tempting":null},{"text":[{"text":"The new microphone has a wider pickup pattern than the phone’s and is collecting sound from the whole room."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Attributes a distance problem to the microphone’s specification rather than to where it was placed."}]},{"text":[{"text":"The recording level is too low for the new microphone, and raising the gain will bring the voice forward."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Treats level as the issue, when raising gain lifts the voice and the room by exactly the same amount."}]},{"text":[{"text":"It is fixable in post: a noise reduction pass will subtract the room and leave the voice."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Expects a tool that learns a steady noise profile to remove reverb, which is the speaker’s own voice arriving late."}]}],"order":[1,3,0,2],"why":null},"prev":{"slug":"what-a-microphone-measures","title":"Pressure, gradient, and everything that follows","minutes":10},"next":{"slug":"the-room-not-the-mic","title":"Direct sound, reverberant sound, and the distance between them","minutes":11}}}