Great chefs talk about "balancing flavors." In audio, it's just as critical to achieve the proper balance between your different sounds. Particularly when it comes to mixing background music with the program's narration or dialog.
One sure way to ruin an otherwise well-made video is to bury the dialog with background music that's too loud. Here, the quality of your audio monitoring equipment can be your best friend or your worst enemy.
Most video monitors, including even high-dollar professional units, are woefully inadequate when it comes to their audio capabilities. Sporting tiny speakers, these units emphasize midrange sounds. They do an often woeful job at high frequencies, and an absolutely dreadful job at letting you hear common low frequency sounds such as traffic noise and air conditioning rumble.
How can you properly balance your soundtrack elements if you can't even hear them accurately? Headphones. Even a modest set of headphones will out-perform a typical video monitor speaker. Plus a decent set of headphones will do double duty since you can take them on location and use them to make sure your field audio recordings are free from sonically "sour" ingred…
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