A news desk that could not be heard: Morag's studio and the echo

Morag manages a small news studio on the first floor of a converted building. She rang us in the early part of the autumn schedule, when the evening bulletin had returned and the complaints had returned with it. Presenters sounded as if they were speaking from the far end of a corridor, and guests on the interview sofa kept being asked to repeat their answers.

She had already tried the usual remedies. A new lavalier microphone set had been bought, gain had been adjusted, and a rug had been laid under the desk. None of it had changed the basic problem, which was that the voices arrived on air with a hard, hollow edge. She asked whether we could come and listen to the room before she spent any more money.

I said yes, and asked her to leave the studio exactly as it was for a normal bulletin: same furniture, same lights running, same ventilation switched on. A room measured when it is tidied up and silent tells you very little about how it behaves on a live night.

I arrived an hour before rehearsal and simply stood in the studio for a while. Clapping once near the desk produced a short, bright flutter that hung in the air a moment too long. That is flutter echo, and it usually means two hard, parallel surfaces facing each other. Here they were a large glazed wall and a plain painted wall opposite.

Then I went into the gallery. The producer's monitoring speakers were sitting close to a corner, and the room felt boomy as soon as anyone spoke. So there were really two separate problems, one in the studio and one in the room where decisions about sound were being made, and they needed separate answers.

I made a note of what I could hear before I opened the case of instruments. Ears are not a substitute for measurement, but they tell you where to point the microphone and which questions the figures need to settle.

We measured the studio with a calibrated microphone and a sweep played through a speaker placed where the presenter sits. The reverberation time was long for a room of that size, and it was longest in the mid frequencies where speech lives. That explained the hollow, distant quality far better than any microphone choice could.

The background noise told a second story. A ventilation unit above the ceiling tiles added a steady hum, and the lighting dimmers gave off a faint buzz that only appeared once the set was lit. Neither was loud, but together they sat directly beneath the voice and forced the gain up.

In the gallery, the response curve showed a heavy build-up in the low frequencies near the speaker position. Morag had been mixing against that bass bump without knowing it, which is why her bulletins sounded thin on other equipment.

• Long mid-frequency reverberation in the studio
• Steady ventilation hum under the ceiling
• Dimmer buzz once the set lights were up
• Low-frequency build-up in the gallery corner

We did not cover the walls in foam, which is the instinct many people have. Thin foam absorbs high frequencies and leaves the mid-range reverberation largely untouched, so the room ends up dull and still hollow. Instead we specified fabric-wrapped absorber panels of a proper thickness, placed where the reflections actually travelled.

The glazed wall received heavy curtains on a track, which Morag could draw during bulletins and open for daylight at other times. The painted wall opposite took a group of panels at head height, staggered so the surface stayed visually calm behind the guests. A small cloud of absorption above the desk dealt with the ceiling reflection.

In the gallery we moved the speakers away from the corner and added deeper absorption behind the listening position. The ventilation was a separate job for the building's contractor, and we gave Morag a short written note describing the noise level to ask for.

Installation took two days and the studio was back in use for the following evening. I stayed for that bulletin, sitting in the gallery with headphones. The first thing I noticed was how little there was to notice. The presenter simply sounded close and level, and the hard edge on the opening words had gone.

Morag told me the guest on the sofa that night did not ask to repeat a single answer. Her sound operator lowered the gain on the presenter's microphone, which reduced the hum and the spill from the other voices at the same time. That is the pattern we see often: fix the room and the microphones stop having to work so hard.

We repeated the sweep measurement the next morning, and the reverberation time had dropped into a comfortable range for speech. We gave her the before and after figures in a short report, so the work could be checked against the room rather than against anyone's memory.

The lesson I take from this studio is that the visible kit is rarely the cause. Morag had spent money on microphones when the room was the fault, and the gallery had been quietly misleading her for months. Measuring first meant every pound afterwards went on something that made a difference.

It also reminded me that treatment should suit the way a studio is used. Curtains she could draw, panels that looked tidy on camera, and speakers moved rather than replaced were all choices made around her working day, not around a textbook diagram.

If your guests keep repeating themselves or your presenters sound far away, listen to the room on a normal live night before changing anything else. A short measurement visit will usually tell you where the problem sits.