Relationary Marketing

Transcript: Episode 6 of Brandcasting with Relationary Marketing

Episode Title: It’s More Than Just Your Mic with Robb Wenner 

Robb Wenner: Your number one goal is to make sure that the listener is engaged. The listener is paying attention to your message, listening to the story and whatever you can do to make sure that listener does not leave that because of something you can take care of…really important.

Clark Buckner: That’s Robb Wenner. He’s the marketing manager at Auralex Acoustics. And let me tell you, these folks are the best in the sound treatment business. They work with professional musicians and podcast studios around the world. In fact, right here in our Nashville studio, we enjoy the benefits of Auralex. So it’s only fitting that we had Robb explain why your podcast’s audio quality matters. Let’s face it, it’s a direct reflection of your brand and credibility. He joins us to share some tips and tricks for getting the highest audio quality possible, elevating your show from good to great.

Clark Buckner: Welcome to Brandcasting with Relationary Marketing. The show all about how to build a professional branded podcast that delivers on your business’s goals. I’m your host Clark Buckner, partner and co-founder here at Relationary, a turnkey podcast production agency for B2B content marketing. We help brands and agencies create engaging content to establish thought leadership, nurture key relationships and promote events. For a recap and transcript of this episode and to download our free five step guide to building a branded podcast, head on over to relationarymarketing.com/podcast. All right, let’s jump in.

Robb Wenner: I’m the marketing manager for Auralex Acoustics. The company has been in business for over 40 years and it’s based in Indianapolis. I’m actually based here in Nashville. I went to Berklee College of Music in Boston for a little bit of time thinking I was going to be a famous jazz drummer. Found out that that wasn’t really going to happen for me, because there’s a lot better players there so to speak. And I started getting into doing audio post production work. And I was living in California and I got a chance to work with Chuck Jones, who did all the original Road Runner cartoons and Bugs Bunny cartoons and things like that. I worked with him doing a number of shorts and we did the Warner Brothers first online animated show called Thomas Timberwolf. And so that was a dream that I had grown up watching those cartoons and I never ever thought I would work with him doing that stuff.

Robb Wenner: And I got to work with Jim Henson Company and did some work on some of the Muppet things. I’ve worked on a lot of movies, television shows, stuff for Discovery Channel. And even though I’m working for Auralex, I’ve continued that business on the side. It’s not my full-time thing now, but I still do a lot of that work. And I’ve started doing a few editing things for podcasts, and movies and stuff. But what was really weird is that I started this company, it’s called New Noise, but it’s newnoiseonline.com. I started this company on a sail boat in Marina del Rey, California. And this was way before it was cool to have your portable recording rig and all that stuff. But I was doing commercial work for, I did stuff for Oscar Meyer and a couple other big ad agencies.

Robb Wenner: I did all my editing and some recording stuff on this boat, and I couldn’t tell the client, “Hey, I’m sitting here on my boat, editing your commercial,” but I had to come up with ways to make it…to when I was recording any kind of voices or anything like that, I needed to figure out a way, how am I going to make this not sound one, like I’m on a boat, but two make it sound professional? So that got my interest started in acoustics as well. And I’ve built a couple of my own studios over the years and have really got a good understanding of what it takes to do all that stuff. But ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been passionate about sound and fascinated about sound. And so I’ve been fortunate my entire life to be involved and working in something I really love and good acoustics is part of that.

Clark Buckner: I love that. Well, I’m so happy to have you in the studio with us, Robb. And so how long have you been working at Auralex now?

Robb Wenner: I’m going on seven years. And I was a customer of Auralex prior to that for about 10 years.

Clark Buckner: So tell me more about Auralex, just real quick recap. Who started it, the story behind it, and then we’ll continue on with our conversation about how important audio quality is, especially in podcasts.

Robb Wenner: Exactly. Auralex Acoustics was started by Eric Smith. He actually started it in the garage of his parents outside of Indianapolis and he was in broadcasting. He was a radio DJ and he was working at a studio that had, he said, he didn’t like the way the room sounded that he was in, the recording space they were in. And so he started looking around trying to find an inexpensive or an affordable way to do sound treatment, to make it sound better. And at that time, this is about 40 years ago, there was really one option and they were ridiculously expensive and trying to figure out how to do it was even more of a mysterious thing. And so he started this company Auralex and came up with some different types of products that were affordable for people and just started marketing that. And it’s grown to be the biggest, most recognized acoustical treatment manufacturer over the last 40 years. I mean, it’s pretty cool.

Clark Buckner: Incredible. Really is like the Kleenex brand, when people say…

Robb Wenner: pretty much

Clark Buckner: Auralex-

Robb Wenner: Exactly. Which is a good thing and a bad thing.

Clark Buckner: And we’ll talk about why. We’ll get into that why. But yeah, Robb, welcome back-

Robb Wenner: Thank you.

Clark Buckner: …to the studio. And you’ve been on this journey with us when we started Relationary several years ago. Now we are here slowly making improvements. We’ve been bootstrap, we’re profitable, all that, but we’ve been slowly in reinvesting a lot of what we’ve been doing back into the business, including this studio. So everything in here we’ve we have, we’re sitting around this beautiful custom created table, locally made. It sounds incredible in here. We’ll talk about why the treatment we’ve done in here, being Auralex, has all helped. It’s been so cool to see you visit me over the years. And when you clocked in today, I feel like we’ve arrived.

Robb Wenner: Absolutely. Absolutely. It sounds great in here. It looks awesome. A small space is really difficult to deal with acoustically and you did a great job with this. It really worked out well.

Clark Buckner: Well, just for fun, I’m going to play a clap. But when you first came in here, I thought like, who is this man? You walk around clapping and whistling, looks like you’re talking to yourself in the corner.

Robb Wenner: Which that happens. Okay. But-

Clark Buckner: And then you were explaining to me all that, why you’re doing that and we’ll talk about. This episode on our podcast will be more on the technical side, but we’re definitely going to be talking about the why it matters. But this is a before and after, let’s see if we can hear this. A clap before and after. Isn’t that nuts? That’s what we’re in right now.

Robb Wenner: Yeah, absolutely. Our goal is to take the room out of the recording, right? So some spaces are great. So you may want that vibe. You may want it to be like you’re in a big space and you’re talking to a lot of people. That’s fine. But if you’re trying to get an intimate conversation with someone and be able to understand everything that person is saying, it’s really important to try and treat the space and deal with the problems that you’re having with all the sound in the room, reflections in the room. Even if it’s a small room, you have the reflections. Dealing with high frequency problems, dealing with low frequency problems are a big issue in small rooms. Because I always look at a room like I’m going to fill it up with water and if you filled up a room, water is going to try and escape because of the physical pressure of that water, trying to go somewhere.

Robb Wenner: And it’s going to find any hole it can to go and leave and drain the room. Sound is very similar to that. Frequencies need to go somewhere. Low frequencies or base frequencies are very long. And if they get trapped in a small space or they’re not trapped, but if they’re not treated in a small space, you get this weird buildup of low frequencies, because they’re just stuck. That causes again, the whole issue of, okay, why can’t I understand what they’re saying in here.

Clark Buckner: It muddies it up.

Robb Wenner: It muddies it up. The mud that you don’t want. So that’s the issue with low frequencies in a smaller space. The best example of how low frequencies travel is if say you’re standing outside of a building, and you hear sounds like there’s a party going on and you hear music and you hear that [inaudible 00:09:48]. The closer you get to the building, the more you hear more of the music, the more you hear of the voices in the background and soon as you open the door, you hear everything. You hear all of the frequency information. That’s demonstrating that the base frequency is traveling a lot farther than all the other frequencies of the higher frequencies in mid-range. And so it’s important to try and deal with that and try and work with base trapping, which is a term we use all the time, certainly for small rooms and larger midsize rooms, things like that.

Clark Buckner: I love it. And the reason why all of this matters is at the end of the day, creating a podcast, you have a message to share and you want to create a wonderful experience for your guests if they are joining you in studio. But also you want to make sure your listener and listeners, they are able to enjoy and not be fatigued by what they’re listening. Because even if they’re driving, or maybe they’re out walking the dog, or going on a run, or doing the chores, data continues to show how podcast consumption is on the rise year after year. And we know that, that commute time, these passive chore activities, these are protected times in everyone’s lives.

Clark Buckner: You got to have wonderful sound and content because now we’re at a point where there’s over 600,000 podcasts out there. I mean, ones are actually live and active. That number is probably at least half that, but the point is you have to have professional sounding audio content because of that fatigue. I know you do a lot of work, Auralex does a lot of work houses of worship, corporate environments, restaurants.

Robb Wenner: If you think about a restaurant and then there’ve been a number of studies about restaurants, and then usually one of the number one reasons someone gives a restaurant a bad review is not because the food was bad or the service was really bad, it’s because it sounded horrible. You went in to have dinner with someone or lunch or you have a business meeting or whatever, and it’s so loud and the sound is so uncontrolled that you can’t communicate effectively. And there’s a theory that restaurant owners like to get it to sound like it’s busy and reverberant and stuff, because it makes it sound like there’s more of a crowd there, but a lot of people react negatively to that.

Robb Wenner: And so that’s something that you just got to keep in mind with anything that you’re doing is that it really is. If the audience can’t understand what it is you’re saying and your message, then that’s a losing battle. And it doesn’t take a lot of money, a lot of time to figure out how to fix the acoustics inside your room. It takes a little more time and a little more money to stop sound transmission from leaving a space, but to treat the interior of a room, it’s really not as difficult as it may seem.

Clark Buckner: Wow. There’s a lot of different data and stats, we’re always following really closely. Weekly podcast listeners, average seven podcasts in the last week. So there’s a lot of consumption happening, but if you’re listening to the podcasts that have a bad audio quality, that’s one of the highest complaints people have and they just won’t listen to it. And if they do listen to it, it’s going to reflect poorly on the brand.

Robb Wenner: Right. And that’s probably one of the first comments someone makes. A great interview, but you know what? It was really distracting to hear noise in the room. Even if you watch somebody on being interviewed on the news now, if someone’s just doing something through FaceTime or whatever, if they’re in a bad room and it’s pingy and reverberant, it’s not very fun to listen to, even though it could be earth chattering news. It’s like, well boy, I don’t know if I believe it or not.

Clark Buckner: Yeah. I can’t remember if it was you who told me this or maybe someone else, but if you’re at a networking event, and this might even include restaurants when it’s loud and sounds busy. If you’re at a connecting environment like this where you’re meeting new people and it’s really loud around you, and you’re listening to the person, you can see them. And as humans, we can detect, we can zone in on what’s being said, but it takes brain power.

Robb Wenner: Absolutely. I was just going to mention that.

Clark Buckner: Okay, you are the guy who told me this?

Robb Wenner: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, we are surrounded by noise 24 hours a day. No one lives in an anechoic chamber, which is devoid of any sound at all. And our brains become used to certain things. You’re not necessarily filtering it out, but you’re just pushing it aside, any kind of background noise and things like that, but that makes your brain work harder. And if you’re trying to listen to a podcast and you hear this weird room noise, or you hear some sort of pingy noise, or you hear a lot of external noise coming in or bleeding into it, even though you’re the listener you’re trying to decode. Okay, what are they saying? I’m trying not to pay attention to this noise in the background and what are they saying?

Robb Wenner: And you’re just using a lot more brain power to filter all of that out. That’s why again, getting a room to sound good, you don’t have to be in a completely dead silent room. That’s one thing. It’s just important to be able to control the acoustics inside the room to just make it sound better, sound more natural. People think, “Well, when I’m in a room and I’m talking and it’s all pingy and reverberant, that’s natural, right?” I go, “Not necessarily, because again, you’re forcing the listener to filter all that out, to understand what it is you’re saying.

Clark Buckner: That’s really good. Well, this might be a good spot to also, you and I were just talking about a podcasting conference that just came through Nashville, Pod X. And while I was there, I got the chance to talk to another local Nashville podcaster, his name’s Marcus. So this was actually something we had in the studio. And on site, they had a little recording environment. We were talking about this topic of sound quality. So I’m going to play a clip of this.

Marcus: Another thing that poor audio quality can potentially do for your podcast in a bad way is you could potentially lose listeners because people have so much media to consume nowadays, not just podcasts, but YouTube, social media, all that stuff. So if you’re not doing everything you can to keep their attention, they’re going to go somewhere else especially if they’re not comfortable listening to your podcast because it sounds so bad.

Clark Buckner: It’s a real thing.

Robb Wenner: Absolutely. I mean when you go and watch a movie, if you can’t to understand the dialogue in a movie, you lose interest in the movie. And this goes with television shows, it goes with whatever or however you’re watching anything. If you can’t understand the dialogue, it takes you out of the story. It takes you out of the experience and you can’t take that risk. Your number one goal is to make sure that the listener is engaged, the listener is paying attention to your message, listening to the story and whatever you can do to make sure that listener does not leave that because of something you can take care of, really important.

Robb Wenner: I’ve been doing sound editing for almost 30 years. I’ve worked in film, I’ve worked in television advertising, and that’s always been your first thing is if you can’t understand the message, if you can’t understand the story, then you’ve not done your job as a sound production or sound editor. So very important. And podcasts, it’s about sound, it’s about a message, it’s about a story. And if you are not delivering that to your audience, then yeah, you’re going to lose. You’re not going to get anywhere with it. And if you’re at a certain point, you may lose people because of that, because it’s a consistent, annoying issue that the sound quality is not good.

Clark Buckner: From a production standpoint there’s that phrase, we’ll fix it in post.

Robb Wenner: Oh, I knew you were going to say that.

Clark Buckner: And well, you don’t want that for a couple reasons. So let’s go through some of your reasons why, what does fix it in post if there’s a tingy sound in a podcast recording environment?

Robb Wenner: Well, if you’re in a space where you don’t have the ability to control the acoustics, there are a lot of tools that we have via software editing that people are using either Adobe Audition, Reaper, Audacity, GarageBand, Pro Tools. I mean, there’s a lot of different options you have, and they all have some way to go in and do noise reduction which is a helpful tool. Very, very helpful thing to be able to do. The problem with that though is if you’re spending more time doing all of that, then you are actually doing any of the creative part of it, where you’re doing any kind of creative editing, adding music, adding sound effects, adding anything like that. It’s just a big time waster to have to deal with that. And if you start with a really good recording and you don’t have to worry about all of the noise reduction issue, it’s just a faster process.

Clark Buckner: Yeah. More time from also publishing, marketing.

Robb Wenner: Oh, absolutely.

Clark Buckner: Getting the word out.

Robb Wenner: And I mean, there’s a lot of things you have to do. And one of the things you don’t want to have to do is sit there and go, “Okay, well, can I get rid of that roomy noise now with my software?” I’m not against it. And it’s a necessary tool for certain situations, but the whole goal really should be, get a good recording first and not have to deal with that.

Clark Buckner: For this recording, now when we’re in the final post production, I’ll probably take away maybe four decibels of room noise. But that’s it because as a listener, if you’re listening and there’s been things stripped away including room noise and all that, you can start to know something just doesn’t quite sound right, I don’t know what it is. Now, it’s like subliminally a distraction like this doesn’t feel natural. We are so big on the content we create at Relationary. We want it to sound authentic. We want it to sound personable. We want it to sound like you’re just sitting in on a conversation and it feels natural.

Robb Wenner: Exactly. And I’m going to say one other important part of the whole noise reduction thing is if you’re not careful and you rely on it too heavily, and you’re processing it very heavily, you get weird artifacts, you start eliminating a lot of high frequency information that makes someone’s speech more identifiable.

Clark Buckner: Clarifier.

Robb Wenner: Clarifier, exactly. And when you’re broadcasting this over however you’re listening things obviously through wireless speakers or anything like that, anything you do to augment that sound may be detrimental to the broadcast as well, because there’s still a slight amount of compression and you’re still a little bit of things going on. When you convert files to smaller formats, you’re eliminating a lot of the frequencies. So if you start with something where you’ve eliminated a lot of the frequency information that made the dialogue sound good, then that’s a big problem too. So there’s a whole trickle down thing that happens soon as you hit that button and say, “Reduce the noise,” now what are you going to do?

Clark Buckner: So as we’re starting to wrap up, what else would you like to share with us? Anything else on your mind or on your heart about sound quality and how that ultimately gets across successfully to an audience?

Robb Wenner: Well, I mean, it really comes down to just being aware of what you’re recording, listening to the sound quality. When you walk into a space, when you walk into a room that may not be your normal space, pay attention to what it sounds like. And that’s a real big issue too. Some people will show up and go, “Okay, here’s where we’re recording.” You’re like, “Yikes, how do I deal with that?” So there’s a number of different ways to do that. Auralex has got a number of different types of products that we have too. One thing that’s really helpful, I think is that we have an app called the RLX app. It’s available on the Apple app store and also on Google Play. It’s just called RLX. And what that does is it’s an easy way for someone to put in their room dimensions, put in the type of recording that they’re doing, whether it be either recording studio or podcast studio, or voiceover or whatever.

Robb Wenner: And based on the room dimensions and the data that we have from all of the years of experience we have doing this, will give you three different options of sound treatment. And we also have a section for sound isolation, which helps trying to suppress sound leaving or entering a space. And that’s a helpful tool to just at least get started and figure out, okay, what do I need to do in this space? What do I need to figure out to help control the acoustics in this room? But the other thing I want to mention too is there a lot of do it yourself things to do. There’s certainly ways to deal with that. And if you’re on a tight budget or you just want to experiment, certainly ways to do that. We have a lot of information on our website that’s not geared just to say, “Hey, buy our products.” It’s geared to educate people about good acoustics. So I would encourage you to check that information out as well.

Robb Wenner: And then the other thing too is that we have a lot of different types of products. You can record anywhere in the world with the equipment that we have. But again, you have to deal with the room that you’re in, that you’re trying to record in. And so we came up with these portable treatment kits that if you’re in an apartment and you can’t attach things to the walls permanently, these are on stands and you can build a little recording area. You can build a little monitoring area and it helps control the room reflections in the room.

Robb Wenner: And so those have been really popular. Those have been great because they’re easy to do. You can take them down and put them somewhere else. You can cart them around. If you need to set up a small little booth somewhere, if you’re recording with somebody on site. So a lot of different ways to do that. And we have, have a lot of different types of acoustical treatment, different price levels, different designs, that kind of thing that are real popular, not only just in recording studios, but through broadcast, voiceover, podcasting, everything. And so just go to auralex.com.

Clark Buckner: How do you spell that?

Robb Wenner: A-U-R-A-L-E-X

Clark Buckner: Robb, thanks so much.

Robb Wenner: Oh, you’re welcome.

Clark Buckner: For coming back, checking in. I’m excited about the future.

Robb Wenner: Room sounds awesome. And I mean, I think what makes it enjoyable for people to certainly come into your studio is that it looks cool. It looks inviting. It doesn’t look like you’re sitting in the closet somewhere or you’re-

Clark Buckner: Under the hamper of clothes.

Robb Wenner: Exactly, exactly. Or you have your comforter above your head and trying to make it sound good. And I think that’s important too, is to make it look good. And certainly if you do any video related podcasting too, you want it to look professional, you want it to look like you know what you’re doing, so.

Clark Buckner: It’s a good investment.

Robb Wenner: Yeah, absolutely.

Clark Buckner: All the reasons. Well, I’m so glad for our episode about audio quality. We can get a little technical, but I hope that we can really explain the why, because there is a reason why we do all of this and there’s reason why we like to work with folks like you.

Robb Wenner: Well, thanks.

Clark Buckner: Thank you so much.

Robb Wenner: You’re welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Clark Buckner: Hey, thanks so much for listening to Brandcasting with Relationary Marketing. We’re a turnkey podcast production agency for content marketing. And we’d love to hear from you. For a recap and transcript of this episode and to download our free five step guide to building a branded podcast, visit relationarymarketing.com/podcast. And if you enjoy this content, please follow, rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll see you next time. Brandcasting is a production of Relationary Marketing. This episode was produced by Darcy Mack and executive producers, Clark Buckner, me, and Chuck Bryant with editing support from Dylan Carrow and music by Jess Grommet. Additional production support is provided by Anthony Luciani, AJ Meyers, Riley Wallace, and Jasmine Meriweather.