Monitoring Audio

A dive into how imperative audio monitoring is, for simplifying audio workflow to achieve desired results.

- Anisha Gakhar

Audio monitoring is the process of metering audio levels, using a visual display. This helps maintain audio signals at their optimum level, along with helping minimise degradation. Broadcasters and recording companies employ audio monitors to help them assess the aesthetic merits of the programme, and to tailor the balance by audio mixing and mastering to achieve the desired end result. Loudspeakers are also an essential concept, required at various points in the process, to enable engineers to ensure that the programme is reasonably free from technical defects, such as degradation, audible distortion or background noise.

The process of audio monitoring usually involves mixing the audio for it to sound appealing on the widest range of playback devices. These systems include high-end audio, low-quality radios, event arenas, car stereos or home stereos. Most professional audio-production studios employ several sets of monitors.

Prinyar Boon, product manager, PHABRIX, said, “The technical and subjective monitoring of audio is typically more involved than video. Audio workflows involve the production of many different packaged deliverables with many tens or hundreds of mic sources, dozens of stems, multiple mixes — say, for host and world feeds, multiple languages. An international sports host broadcaster servicing several unilaterals in addition to the world feed may have to deliver tens of video feeds, but several thousand channels of accompanying audio.”

THE CONCEPT

There are a wide range of audio formats, from mono, dual mono, 2.0 stereo, to all the different combinations of multichannel and immersive channel and object-based formats. “Video by comparison, 3D aside, is essentially a mono format and it is much simpler to create a high-quality video monitoring environment than the audio equivalent,” added Boon.