Speak up! Why some TV dialogue is so hard to understand

[RothwellAudio]

Tape commercial telly...

Tape? What is this tape of which you speak?

[Barry]

Tape? What is this tape of which you speak?

A figure of speech for a hard disk recorder.

[Macca]

I like to pepper my speech with anachronisms. Confuses the youngsters

[Firebottle]

It confuses the rest of us, never mind the youngsters

[walpurgis]

Don't like youngsters. I know what they're like, I used to be one!

[Pharos]

What you say is contrary to my experience Andrew, and surely the loss of presence and top are a real problem with speech intelligibility, on which it depends.

This evening, as is the case so often, a lavalier was under a guy's chin on his crewe neck, probably getting proximity boost as well as the loss described, and not bothering to use the other side of a jacket to ensure that the mic is up rather than down is pure laziness.

When I mixed radio programmes I was criticised for even a small angle off axis, and very little of what is churned out now would have been acceptable then.

[RothwellAudio]

What you say is contrary to my experience Andrew, and surely the loss of presence and top are a real problem with speech intelligibility, on which it depends.

This evening, as is the case so often, a lavalier was under a guy's chin on his crewe neck, probably getting proximity boost as well as the loss described, and not bothering to use the other side of a jacket to ensure that the mic is up rather than down is pure laziness.

When I mixed radio programmes I was criticised for even a small angle off axis, and very little of what is churned out now would have been acceptable then.

Yes, I agree, the mic has to be used competently to get good results. I only meant that the microphones themselves are not poor devices imho and although the term "electret" has some bad connotations I have found them to be excellent in terms of sound quality, though the signal-to-noise ratio isn't up there with the best.