One of the most, if not the most overlooked aspects of a quality recording is room acoustics. Just walk into the bathroom and shut the door. Place yourself in the middle of the room and clap your hands. Hear that echo? That is precisely the wrong place to record your podcast. If you walk into the room you plan to record your podcast and do the same thing and get a similar result your going to have problems. The recording will sound “confused” with your voice being heard multiple times at multiple levels and often one sentence bleeding into the next. What does a good space sound like? Surprisingly you probably have a great example sitting in your garage or driveway. Most cars (or SUVs for that matter) are near studio-quality recording spaces but I don’t expect you to do your podcast in one. Try clapping your hands in the car. It should be a single sharp tone without any echo at all, which is much closer to what you are looking for.
So what if your space sounds more like the bathroom? There are a few steps you can take to lower the amount of echo to make the space better suited to recording. First, look around the space and see if there are any hard surfaces you can eliminate. Hardwood floor? Try a rug. Windows? Some drapes will do. Add soft items to the room such as fabric furniture, especially in corners. You can even put up a rod and some thick drapes along a wall, or go the route of acoustic foam or the less permanent but more costly acoustic panels on the walls. Two things to consider with acoustic foam or panels. First, make sure you are buying a product that is fire-retardant. Cheap acoustic foam that isn’t certified to be flame retardant is like putting fuel all over your walls. Second, you don’t need 100% coverage to be effective as even 25% coverage can make a big difference. Eliminating all the echo is not the goal, just reducing it so it isn’t noticeable. Lastly don’t think that adding sound panels to your walls will keep outside noises from getting into the room or for that matter keeping your sound inside the room, they are merely to reduce sound reflections, they are not “soundproofing” materials. To keep the room sounds from getting in, or out, you need to stop air movement between spaces such as sealing doors with weather stripping or a door sweep at the bottom to make it as close to air-tight as possible. If possible heating and AC vents should be closed as they can often bring in sounds from the entire house. Once you have a reasonably good-sounding room then spend your time, money, and effort into addressing specific issues that are particular to your space rather than initially trying to address every issue that “could” be a problem when in fact it might not even be a problem at all.
