Treating the room before measuring it
The most common mistake is buying panels first and asking questions afterwards. A studio that sounds boomy to a presenter may have a low-frequency problem that thin foam cannot touch, while a room that sounds harsh may simply have two bare parallel walls close to the desk. Without a measurement, every purchase is a guess, and guesses tend to deaden the high end while leaving the real fault untouched.
A simple reverberation measurement across a few positions takes well under an hour and tells you where the energy lingers. Priya Nair, our acoustics consultant, repeats the sweep at the presenter position, at the guest chair and near the camera lines, because a studio rarely behaves the same everywhere. Write the numbers down before treatment so you can prove the change afterwards.
Measuring first also protects the budget. Once you can see which frequency bands are out of balance, you can specify a smaller quantity of the right material rather than covering every surface and hoping.
- Measure at presenter, guest and camera positions
- Record figures before any treatment goes up
- Decide the target before choosing material
Using foam as a cure for everything
Thin acoustic foam is cheap, light and easy to fit, which is exactly why it is overused. It absorbs mainly the upper mid and high frequencies, so a room treated only with foam often sounds dull and muffled while the low-mid honk of a presenter's voice still rings. The result is a studio that looks treated and still fails on air.
Dense mineral wool panels, fabric-wrapped and spaced off the wall, work across a wider range and last far longer under studio lighting heat. Bass traps in corners deal with the build-up foam ignores. Mixing materials deliberately, with each doing a defined job, gives a flatter and more natural result than any single product used everywhere.
Check the fire rating of whatever you fit, particularly above a set where lamps run for hours. A cheaper material that fails that check costs far more once it has to come down again.
Ignoring noise that comes from the building
Reverb gets the attention, but intrusive noise is often the harder fault. Air handling units, lighting ballast hum, rumble from a lift shaft or a corridor door slamming will all reach the microphones. Panels inside the room do almost nothing against these because the sound is arriving through the structure, not bouncing around the space.
Walk the studio at its quietest and again with the building fully occupied, listening on headphones from the desk. Note every source and its character. Often the fix is modest: a flexible duct connection, a door seal, a rubber isolation mount under a fan, or moving a noisy rack out of the studio floor altogether.
Separating airborne noise from vibration matters, because they need different remedies. Mass and sealing stop the first, while decoupling stops the second.
- Listen at quiet and busy times
- Seal doors and check duct connections
- Move noisy racks out of the studio floor
Over-treating until the room feels dead
There is a point where more absorption makes things worse. Presenters talk to a room, and when it has no life at all they tend to push their voices, tense up and sound strained. A studio with almost no reflection also makes ear-piece monitoring uncomfortable for guests, who lose their sense of space after a few minutes.
Aim for controlled rather than eliminated reverb. For speech-led programmes a short, even decay across the frequency range reads as natural and keeps dialogue intelligible after compression and streaming. Leave some hard surface on the set side, away from the microphones, and the room will sound lived-in rather than clinical.
Test with a real presenter reading real script before finalising. Their comfort is a measurement too, and it is one a meter cannot supply.
Placing microphones and furniture without thinking about reflections
Treatment can be perfect and dialogue still suffers if a microphone sits over a glass table or beside a bare wall. Early reflections arriving a few milliseconds after the direct voice cause the hollow, comb-filtered sound that no amount of equalisation fully repairs. Desk surfaces, monitors and set pieces all count.
Small habits help: a soft felt or fabric desktop under the microphone, boundary-aware positioning, and angling hard set pieces away from the capture path. We also ask crews to mark microphone positions on the floor so a reset after a rehearsal does not quietly shift the sound.
Callum and Priya often walk a set together for exactly this reason, because camera lines, lighting stands and audio capture compete for the same few square metres and each decision affects the others.
- Use a soft desktop under microphones
- Angle hard set pieces away from capture
- Mark microphone positions on the floor
Skipping the check after the work is finished
Once panels are up, the project often ends with a quick listen and a handshake. Without a second measurement, nobody knows whether the room reached its target or whether one corner is still ringing. Treatment can also be installed slightly differently from the plan, and small deviations add up.
Repeat the original measurements at the same positions and compare. Keep the before and after figures with the studio documentation so a new engineer inherits the reasoning, not just the hardware. Revisit the room after a few weeks of real programmes, since presenters and formats change and so does what the room needs.
A short written note listing materials, positions and results saves hours the next time a set is rebuilt or a wall is moved.
Good dialogue in a studio rarely comes from one clever product. It comes from measuring first, matching each material to a specific problem, dealing with building noise separately, stopping before the room feels dead, thinking about microphone surroundings and checking the result afterwards. Avoid these six habits and most of the usual trouble disappears before the first live programme goes out.
