Audio Engineering: A Checklist Before You Decide on Your Sound Plan
Before you commit to an audio plan for a programme or live event, these are the questions worth settling: sources, monitoring, rehearsal time and who owns the mix on transmission day.
When a producer asks me about audio, the first thing I ask for is a list of every voice and sound source that will be live at any point in the show. Presenters, guests, a band, playback from a laptop, a roaming microphone in the audience: each one changes the plan. It is much cheaper to find out on paper that you need eight channels than to discover it during rehearsal. Write the list in running order, not alphabetically. A source that only appears for ninety seconds in the final segment still needs a microphone, a check and someone who knows when to open it. Missing items on this list are the most common cause of last-minute scrambling that I see on productions of every size.
Be honest on the list about what you do not yet know. If the guest line-up is not confirmed, say so, and note the likely range: two guests or four. A sound engineer can plan around a range, and can price and staff around it. What cannot be planned around is a surprise on the day, when a fifth person walks onto the set wearing nothing but a lapel clip from their own phone call.
Microphone choice follows from where people stand and how much they move. A seated presenter in a treated studio can use a discreet boom or a fixed desk microphone, while a presenter walking between sets will need a wireless pack and a lapel or headset capsule. Neither is better in the abstract; each is right for a particular piece of staging.
Ask how the set will look on camera before deciding. A wide shot that shows the whole table rules out some microphone positions, because anything visible has to look intentional. Priya, our senior audio engineer, often asks to see the camera plan before she writes the microphone plan, since the two have to agree about what the audience is allowed to see.
Wireless microphones share airspace with everything else in the venue, and a venue that looks quiet can be crowded once other crews arrive. Ask who else will be using radio equipment on the day, including other productions in the same building, and make sure someone is responsible for checking frequencies on site rather than assuming last month's settings still work.
The room matters as much as the radio. Hard walls, glass and bare floors will add reflections that no mixer can fully remove later. A short walk around the space with a clap and a listening ear tells you a great deal. If speech sounds muddy in the empty room, it will not sound better with an audience absorbing little and rustling a lot.
Monitoring is the part of an audio plan that gets forgotten until a presenter says they cannot hear the cue. Decide in advance who needs what: earpieces for presenters taking directions, foldback speakers for musicians, headphones for the crew at the desk. Each of these is a separate mix with its own needs, and each takes a little time to set up and test.
The control room needs reliable monitoring too. Agree on a listening level that stays the same throughout the day, because mixing at a louder level in the afternoon than in the morning leads to a different balance on transmission. Consistency here is quieter, less visible work than choosing equipment, and it makes the broadcast sound the same from the first rehearsal to the last minute.
Cameras and lighting tend to take the first slots in any schedule, which leaves audio squeezed into the gaps. Ask for a dedicated sound check with real speakers, at real speaking volume, wearing the actual clothing they will wear on air. A jacket that rubs a lapel microphone is a problem you want to meet at ten in the morning, not after the doors open.
If the show has music, rehearse the transition from speech to music and back, because that is where levels jump and feedback appears. Allow a short slot to run the opening and closing sequences with all sources live. Even fifteen minutes of this settles more questions than an hour of individual line checks done in isolation.
The last item is the simplest to write down and the hardest to fix late: who has the final say on audio once the show is live. If the director, the producer and the engineer all feel free to change levels, nobody is accountable for the result. Agree one person at the desk, one line of communication to the director, and a clear routine for what happens if something fails.
Plan for failure in a modest way. Have spare batteries labelled and to hand, a backup microphone for the main presenter and a known quick route to switch to it. None of this needs elaborate equipment. It needs a short conversation before the day and a note on the run sheet that everyone can find.
A good audio plan is mostly a set of answered questions: what is being heard, by whom, in which room, with which microphones, tested when, and under whose control. Go through the list with your producer and your engineer before you sign anything off. If a question has no answer yet, that is useful information, and it is better to know it a fortnight before the show than in the minutes before transmission.
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