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Podcasting In Hi-Fi: 3 Trends To Watch

Where did the “hi-fi” enthusiast go? It’s hard to not buy a 4K (soon 8K) monitor or TV, a trend noticed by content developers. Yet personal audio reproduction lags behind. But that might be changing.

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A surprising group is largely responsible for the amazing video experiences you have on your new phone, your giant TV, and even your computer monitor. No, I’m not thinking of filmmakers or photographers. I’m thinking about… gamers.

Yes, gamers are largely responsible for the crisp, deep, and rich visual experiences we have come to expect when watching any sort of video on the myriad devices we own.

So it stands to reason that instead of the music labels or the musicians, perhaps podcasters can lead the charge in making devices capable of high-quality audio reproduction in or on our ears every bit as common.

Here are three trends I’m seeing that could indicate a coming shift in how all of us experience sound in our everyday lives. Not just podcasting!

The Rise Of The Smart Listening Device

I don't mean smart speakers. Or rather I should say that I don't only mean smart speakers. Until quite recently, the sound-transmission devices placed over or in our ears were dumb. I’m not oversimplifying too much to say that these devices weren’t much more than tiny speakers shooting sound into our ear canals. Many are well-crafted, and it’s amazing what some engineers have done making resonance chambers with such physical limitations. 

But they haven’t been smart, taking all of their cues from the device that “holds” the audio - $1000 mobile phone, $1000 tube amp plugged into a $1000 turntable, or a vintage Sony Walkman.

Today’s headphones are getting smarter. Apple’s AirPods Pro, for example, have chipsets installed in each earbud. Those two “brains” are necessary to make all of the AirPods Pro magic happen, from detecting when a bud is no longer in the ear to the excellent noise cancellation. 

In essence, this is a chipset dedicated to processing audio. Almost thirty years ago, pioneers like NVIDEA developed chipsets dedicated to processing graphics, mostly so gamers could play games. Not kidding. So thank a gamer the next time you rewatch Lord of The Rings on your 8K walls-sized TV.

Apple isn’t the only company making earbuds/headphones with chipsets. But imagine how much more room Apple’s engineers have to work with on their new over-the-ear-model rumored to come out in a few weeks. Even if that new device doesn’t have a dedicated “APU” - audio processing unit - it’s not a stretch to assume something like an APU is in development. Once earbuds and headphones with APUs become commonplace, you can bet savvy content creators and developers will find ways to make content that shows off the upper limits of that tech. 

Both smart speakers and in-car audio systems - stuffed to the gills with plenty of silicon already -- are getting smarter. There’s a shift in engineering with both to focus less on reproducing the sound exactly as it was distributed, but to craft the sounds they emit to be finely-tuned for the listening environment.

Yes, that means smart speakers can tailor the sound of a podcast to fit the room where the file is played. It means that in-car systems can adjust to changes in road-noise, ensuring passengers can hear the dialog always. Your next set of earbuds or headphones will be able to do that too. Maybe even better.

Superior Streaming Audio

More and more people are streaming their music rather than listening to locally-downloaded high-quality albums. Especially as the prior trend of smarter listening devices continues, the quality level of the experience will be a differentiating factor.

There’s a tradeoff when it comes to quality audio streaming. Conventional wisdom says that the smaller you can make a file, the faster it will stream. But smaller audio files means less fidelity. 

The big streaming audio platforms - Amazon, Spotify, Pandora, Apple, & others - aren’t sitting on their heels. They’re busy developing new compression algorithms that can work in conjunction with the chipsets in smart listening devices to push out higher quality files without impacting bandwidth. I haven’t done a full audio test of this, but I feel like the audio quality of some songs played on Spotify’s new “shows with music” actually sounded better than the track from the album also streamed on Spotify. (Or I’m just projecting what I want to be true.)

Binaural and Spatial Audio

The gear necessary to capture binaural and spatial audio has been around for a while now. The challenge is that listeners often don’t have the listening device to properly reproduce the deep and immersive experiences captured this way.

But that’s changing, and many wireless earbuds are already giving listeners a chance to hear what innovative creators are creating. And here’s the best news: shows presented in binaural or spatial audio tend to be backward compatible. So even if a listener still uses the wired earbuds their phone came with back in 2007, they can still hear the content, just not in its full glory. But they can hear it!

As these trends increase, listeners will demand more and better sound. Content creators will create content that meets that demand, which in turn will spur engineers and developers to come up with new ways to not only capture better sound, but to better reproduce it for the listeners. 

And not just extreme audiophiles. Like anything, the tech will come down in price to the point where it’s almost harder to exclude a chipset than include it, making smart listening devices that can make amazing streaming audio - and podcast - listening experiences a commodity.

Preparing Your Podcast For The Coming Hi-Fi World

There are three things you can do (or start doing) right now to ensure that when this hi-fi world comes to pass in podcasting your content is a near-perfect fit:

1. Save your build/project files.

If you have the uncompressed audio files saved in your DAWs structure, it’s a low-effort job to re-export all of your previous episodes’ .mp3 files in a higher quality format. No, it won’t be fun, but it will be rather straightforward to ensure your show provides a sound-rich environment. Yes, even if it’s just your voice. 

2. Upgrade and reject mediocre sound.

If you know your sound quality could be better, fix it. Bouncing down to .mp3 hides a lot of sins, but those sins come raging back when you start upping the quality. If you’re using cheap equipment because you can only afford cheap equipment, I understand. You’re just going to have to spend more time doing more work to make it not sound like it was recorded with cheap equipment. 

3. Stop exporting to mono. 

Mono files aren’t any smaller than stereo files unless you start cutting bit rate, and cutting bit rate is the opposite direction you want to go if you want your show to sound good in the future. If spatial sound is best, with binaural second, then stereo is third. Mono is an incredibly distant fourth place, and you should not accept fourth place as good enough for your podcasts’ sound.

Hi-fi is coming to podcasting, but I doubt we’ll call it hi-fi. We’ll probably just call it “audio that sounds great everywhere people listen”. Or something catchier. 

Next week, as of this writing, the calendar turns to November. November marks the beginning of Evo’s Long Winters Nap, where I take a break from producing new episodes of Podcast Pontifications until the new year. If you're a working podcaster and you would like to do your own pontificating for an episode of this show while I’m on break, get in touch with me: evo@simpler.media.

If you love the content I'm producing and you really want me to come back (I'm coming back) after the break, please consider going to BuyMeACoffee com/EvoTerra and show me a little love. 

Finally, tell another working podcaster about Podcast Pontification. The only way this show grows is when podcasters like you tell other podcasters like your friends about Podcast Pontifications. 

I’ll be back tomorrow for yet another Podcast Pontifications. 

Cheers!


Published On:
October 26, 2020
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PPS3E52 Podcasting In Hi-Fi- 3 Trends To Watch - Transcript

[00:00:00] Where did the Hi-Fi enthusiastic go. It's hard to not buy a 4k or soon eight K television or monitor a trend. That's not unnoticed by content developers yet personal audio reproduction, lags behind that might be changing.

hello, and welcome to another podcast. Pontifications with me, Evo Terra. Do you know what group is [00:00:30] responsible for the amazing video experiences you have on your new phone, on your TV or on your monitor? It's not filmmakers, not photographers. Yeah. They had an influence, but not the biggest influence. No.

The biggest influence in that crisp, amazing video quality. Gamers. I know, I know people who are hardcore, just fans of video games, which are a lot of people. [00:01:00] So it stands to reason in my crazy head up here that instead of the music labels or the musicians leading the charge in high quality audio reproduction, things that go into our ears from the buds or the phones we are wearing.

What if that's a charge it's being led by podcasters? Hmm. Three trends I want to talk about today, which lead me to believe that there might be finally. Some movements in the high [00:01:30] fidelity back to audio, like it was in the seventies now. Not like it wasn't a seventies, much different than that. Again.

Three different trends, trend number one, smart listening devices. I don't mean smart speakers. Well, I don't only mean smart speakers. I mean, Up until now the devices that we would plug into whatever to give us sound in our ears. Our headphones are earbuds have been dumb devices. They're just speakers and they're well-crafted and [00:02:00] they've done some interesting things.

The engineers have done with the acoustical residents that they can with those that reproduce the highest sound, but have not been very smart. They're super smart. Now. If you bought a new pair, a pair of AirPods pro the Apple product, there's a chip, actually two chips. One in each of these devices has to be because it's all wireless, but also that chip set we've seen what happens when we have new chip sets that are just designed to do certain [00:02:30] things.

I'm thinking of Invidia. The company that really was at the forefront of making high quality graphics, processing units, GPU, which is what's led to the amazing experiences we have today. The chips we have in earbuds right now, like AirPods pro or all the other competitors that are out there too, that they're not that big today, but they got to start somewhere.

Imagine how big the chip sets going to be in Apple's new, over the ear model of AirPods that are rumored to bring out some time this year. [00:03:00] Once you've got a central audio processing unit APU. I dunno, you can do a whole lot more with that. Look, the devices we have in our cars and also the smart speakers we have.

They're all getting better at reproducing sound. That's suited to the environment or went in. I know that you and I probably don't listen to podcasts a lot on our smart speakers, but as I said recently, a lot of people do. And as they get better at reproducing sound, not just 5.1, boom dump, none of that, [00:03:30] not, not necessarily that, but just good reproduction.

People will listen more. We listened more in our car when our car is smart enough system to automatically balance out the level so that we get more of the presence of the speaker in our stereo, in our, in our car stereo, if you will. That kind of goes over the top of the road noise. So one smart listening devices, two encroachments into our space by streaming audio.

Yeah. Streaming audio [00:04:00] continues to drive most listening behaviors. Right. So encroach was probably the wrong word I used there. But if you think that that in conjunction with number one with better listening devices, like smarter earbuds and smarter headphones. Now with these streaming audio platforms competing, I'm talking Amazon, Spotify, Pandora, Apple, you name it better.

Quality of the stream is a differentiating factor. And as these companies develop new compression algorithms not to [00:04:30] scare you. They might be able to push down a higher quality file so that we have better listening experience with much less bandwidth, which is a big concern today. You know, I haven't run the math on this, but just listening to some of Spotify is news shows with music.

You know, the thing that there are, there are podcasts and they are not calling podcast specifically. I think that some of the songs that play in those. Actually sound better to me, a higher fidelity than when I go listen to that [00:05:00] very same album on Spotify. Isn't that weird now might just be me projecting what I want.

I'm not saying that's true, but it sure seems that way. Third track, third thing to track third trend to track binaural and spatial audio. Now, this is a recording process by which you capture a much more rich sound than just stereo. I just panning left to. Right. But a Bernard audio experience, which makes it the way that your ears actually [00:05:30] heard it.

Those sound really cool. When you listen to binaural recorded podcasts and now spatial audio that it lets audio to be placed in front of and behind and up and down. Some pretty cool things are happening. You're not going to get the full experience out of those with a pair of cheap wired earbuds that plug into your phone.

It'll still sound okay. You'll get, you'll get it. But you, the full, the experience is going to be when someone is listening, what the real high quality set of headphones or earbuds, just like you can play a video game on your crappy [00:06:00] monitor. It's going to look a whole lot better when you play it on an eight K monitor, same thing for these experiences that are being developed by audio creators right now.

That just need a better reproduction system, which sounds weirdly sexual than we have today, or a lot of us have today. So this is coming. If you look at the trends high-fidelity is probably going to come. We're going to see more people demanding higher quality because now the things that they plug into their ears can actually reproduce [00:06:30] a much higher quality of sound.

Some things you can do working podcast, or to get ready for this coming trend. Number one, save your bill and your project files. And I hope you've been doing that from day one. I hope you can go back and see the actual uncompressed audio, the whatever you're using, whatever it is, you can actually access your content so that if you need to, I don't have to, but if you need to, you can quickly go through and export those at [00:07:00] a much higher quality level.

If that's what's coming. Second thing you can do, probably the most important thing you can do if you're not making good quality right now, upgrade, we can't afford to accept mediocre sound. I get if you're using cheap equipment, because you have to use cheap equipment, fine, find a way to make it not sound like you're using cheap equipment.

Find a way to where you're getting a good quality captured audio at the source that you're producing. And the third thing you can do [00:07:30] stop exporting your files in mano stop. Right now, Mono's never going to be a thing that anybody wants as we continue to go towards high fi people are going to want those immersive experiences in binaural and spatial audio fine.

Their stereo is a step down from those two things, but mano there's no point stop exporting your files and mano right now. Hi-Fi is coming to podcasting. I think watching these trends [00:08:00] will help us identify when that's going to be. Now next week is November. And that's the beginning of iVOS long winters nap, where I am taking off all of November, all of December.

I'll be back in the first part of January with new content. However, if you're a working podcaster and you would like to, you have your own pontification, you want to get out, get in touch with me. I'm sure we can find a way to get it out on this channel to the billions or. Few hundred people who listened to the program, just send me an email [00:08:30] evo@simpler.media.

Do you love the content I'm producing and you really want me to come back. I'm coming back, uh, go to buy me a coffee com slash Evo Tara, where you can put your money, a couple of bucks where your mouth is and, uh, and help me out. I would appreciate that. And then finally tell another working podcast or about podcast.

Pontification is the only way this show grows is when podcasters lack, you tell podcasters, lack your friends about podcast. Pontifications. That's it. See you [00:09:00] tomorrow for another podcast. Pontifications cheers. .

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Podcast Pontifications is produced by Evo Terra. Follow him on Twitter for more podcasting insight as it happens.
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