Degrading Already-Bad Audio

I’m sitting in a café, sipping coffee that’s either over-brewed or perfect, depending on whether you’ve ever actually tasted coffee before. Across the room, a man is editing a video on his laptop. He has the posture of someone who believes he’s on the cutting edge. I can see the headphones. Closed-back. Cheap. His face flickers in the reflection of the Final Cut Pro timeline, layered with enough AI plugins to make a field recording of a jet engine sound like a pillow fight in a snowstorm.

This—this is the problem.

We live in an age where “content” is produced like fast food: greasy, fast, consistent, and predictably mediocre. And in this great race to publish faster, to shoot wider, to get “engagement,” audio has been left bleeding on the roadside. Dialogue is distorted, flattened, stripped of humanity. It’s plugged into the cheapest camera-top mic available, running through preamps designed by engineers who’ve never heard a human voice outside of a Zoom call. Or worse: captured on a budget wireless lav that automatically “fixes” your levels in real time, shoving every breath and cough to the same volume, like a machine ironing every wrinkle out of a silk suit until it’s just a plastic tarp.

Then comes the post-production butchery. AI de-noisers cranked to eleven. De-verbs that hollow the sound until it’s less “human being speaking” and more “ghost trapped in a tin can.” Mixes where dialogue, music, and effects fight each other in a knife brawl, leaving the listener with fatigue and tinnitus.

And it’s not just amateur YouTubers in this pit. This sickness has crawled up the chain—ads, documentaries, even films where the budget could have hired an entire sound crew. We expect less now. We tolerate worse. We have replaced “clear and immersive” with “loud and compressed” because, frankly, it’s easier.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t have to be this way.

You can stop the rot. You can return to the days when audio wasn’t an afterthought but the spine of a production. The solutions aren’t mysterious:

1. Leave audio to audio professionals. If your production has a camera department, it should have a sound department. Hire the recordist. Pay the mixer. Give the audio team the time and resources to make the work right.
2. Learn how sound actually works. If you insist on doing it yourself, take the time to understand gain staging, mic placement, and the physics of sound capture. Audio is invisible, but it is not magic.
3. Buy equipment that doesn’t ruin your sound. Yes, it will cost more than a $30 shotgun mic from Amazon. Yes, you’ll have to learn how to use it. But the reward is dialogue that breathes, that lives, that makes your story feel real instead of manufactured.

Because here’s the truth: when you ruin your audio, you’re not just hurting your video. You’re hurting your audience. You’re lowering the standard. You’re training people to settle for less.

And if you let that continue, one day, we’ll all wake up in a world where everything looks perfect, but nothing sounds real.

I finish my coffee. The man in the café clicks export. Somewhere in that file, under the filters and artifacts, I imagine there was once a voice worth hearing.

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