Audio Mastering for Auto Attendant & On Hold Messaging
Producing professional auto attendant and on hold messaging programs in our recording studio grants us the benefit of achieving CD audio quality and beyond, up to 96 KHz at 24 bit if needed. But due to telephony’s poor fidelity or narrow bandwidth, especially on VOIP systems, it’s imperative to compensate with audio production tools such as EQ, compressors and limiters to improve the sound quality of auto attendant and on hold messaging delivered to these business telephone systems.
Mind The Gap uses three production steps to achieve the maximum amplitude and clarity of a voice recording. In step 1, as shown in Sample A, this is a voice recording in which we applied a modest compression ratio of about 4:1 during the vocal session.
Next, we use a combination of EQ and compression to give the voice a “punch” within its optimized frequency range as shown in Sample B. You can see and hear the difference between Samples A and B.
Finally, we send this processed voice recording through a limiter to maximize its overall volume without making it clip. This is the mastering phase. See and hear this processor in Sample C. The difference in amplitude and clarity between Samples A and C is dramatic.
These measures help to compensate for the file formats required by today’s telephony and VOIP systems that greatly reduce the sonic quality of auto attendant and on hold messaging. In Sample D, we converted the original voice recording (Sample A) from 44.1 KHz @ 16 bit to 8 KHz @ 8 bit (u-Law) to work on Cisco Call Manager. As you can hear, this conversion results in very poor fidelity.
But fidelity is improved by applying our audio mastering techniques prior to the conversion process in Sample E. You can hear the difference clearly between Samples D (before mastering) and E (after mastering).
Hopefully manufacturers like Mitel, Avaya, Cisco and others will appreciate the value of professional voice recordings and allocate adequate bandwidth and memory space to accommodate these recordings with higher resolution on their telephony and VOIP systems. Until then, our audio mastering will help make the best of a less than ideal standard for auto attendant and on hold messaging.