What’s a Good Recording?

Good transcripts are created from good recordings and the first characteristic of a good recording is VOICE CLARITY.

There are three key flaws that appear in most voice recordings:

1. Background noise
2. Echo
3. Low volume

These flaws affect the quality of transcription in two ways:

1. The accuracy goes down, because the speakers are hard to understand.

2. The turnaround time goes up, because the transcriptionist has to replay the recording several times to capture everything.

Here are some examples of good and bad recordings:

Recording with background noise 

Recording with echo 

Recording with low volume

A clear interview recording 

How to ensure audio clarity

Use External Microphones

The in-built microphones in most digital voice recorders  and cameras are great for recording single-speaker audio inside a quiet room, but they fail when it comes to:

(a) Recording multiple speakers.

(b) Recording at outdoor locations with ambient noise.

This is because the speakers are not close enough to the in-built microphones.

Also, in-built microphones cannot differentiate between the voice of the speaker and other sounds around them. This means they record all sounds, including ambient sounds.

The answer is to use an external microphone. You can use separate microphones for each speaker or a single microphone that captures all the speakers’ voices.

(Lavaliere microphones are great for recording 2-3 speaker interviews. For a larger group, boundary or lectern microphones are advisable.)

Some more things you can do to improve the clarity of your recording are:

~ Choose a quiet location.

~ Use unidirectional microphones wherever possible.

~ Use pop filters.

~ Tell the participant/s to speak directly into the microphone/DVR.

You can find more articles on creating better recordings here.