Giovanni CordovaOn Listening: What Most Podcasters Never Hear
Discover why podcast audio quality begins before you press record. Learn how microphone choice, positioning, and room treatment shape your sound more than any plugin—and when collaboration serves your creative vision.
Before the Recording
A microphone doesn't capture what you say. It captures everything—the room's reflections, the air between you and the capsule, the resonance of your voice in that particular space.
Most creators hear their recordings. Few truly listen to them.
The difference matters.
What Software Actually Does
Noise reduction analyzes frequency patterns and removes what doesn't match your voice. But it also removes tiny harmonic details that make you sound human. Every correction trades naturalness for cleanliness.
Compression evens out your dynamics. But if your recording already lacks depth because the microphone placement was wrong, you're just making a flat sound more consistently flat.
These tools are powerful. They're also unable to create what was never captured.
The Attention Problem
You're hosting. Monitoring peaks. Adjusting gain. Watching your guest's levels. Thinking about your next question.
Where is your attention? Split five ways, maybe.
This is the real cost of doing everything yourself. Not that you can't learn the technical side—you can. But attention is finite. When you're engineering, you're not completely creating. When you're creating, you're not completely engineering. The work suffers from this division, even when you don't notice it.
What Actually Changes Sound
Before you touch EQ or compression, three things shape your audio more than any processing:
Microphone choice. Dynamic mics reject room noise, need you closer, sound intimate. Condenser mics capture detail, reveal room problems, sound spacious.
Your voice, your space, your content—these determine which serves you.
Positioning. Six inches from a mic versus twelve inches creates entirely different tonal balance. Facing a corner versus facing into the room changes how your voice sits in the mix.
These centimeters matter more than expensive plugins.
Room treatment. Hard surfaces create reflections that arrive milliseconds after direct sound, smearing clarity. Soft materials absorb these reflections.
Your recording improves more from moving blankets strategically placed than from hours of post-production.
An engineer's value isn't mystical. It's pattern recognition from listening critically to thousands of recordings, understanding cause and effect, knowing which variables matter most in your specific situation.
On Collaboration
Making something meaningful rarely happens in isolation. You're always in dialogue—with the space, the tools, the medium itself.
When you work with someone who understands sound deeply, you're not surrendering control. You're gaining perspective you can't access while creating.
They hear what's actually there, not what you imagine is there. They notice what's missing, not just what's wrong.
This changes how you record. Knowing someone is holding the technical dimension allows complete presence with your content.
Your questions deepen. Your listening sharpens. Your guests feel the difference in your attention. The quality that results isn't about expensive equipment. It's about alignment—technical decisions supporting your creative intention rather than fighting it.
The Question
Could you develop these skills yourself? Yes. Many people do.
The question isn't capability. It's whether that path serves what you're trying to create. Whether it opens your work or constrains it.
Some growth comes from learning new skills. Some comes from recognizing which collaborations allow your strengths to emerge.
Your podcast wants to become something specific. Not what tutorials taught you to make. Not what worked for someone else. The thing that emerges when conditions are right and you're free to follow what genuinely interests you.
Creating those conditions is its own craft. Sometimes the most creative choice is knowing what to hold and what to entrust to others.
Listen to what the work needs.
Giovanni Cordova is an audio engineer specializing in podcast production, mixing, and mastering. If this perspective resonates with how you approach your creative work, explore how thoughtful audio engineering might serve your podcast.