The continuing importance of off-air monitoring

How else do you know what your audience is getting?

Back on the "old days" of analogue radio and analogue distribution chains the self-op radio presenter could happily listen to the FM or AM off-air receiver in their headphones.  This meant that even a lone presenter in a local radio station putting out an evening programme could have confidence that at least one transmitter was both working and broadcasting the correct programme.

Such immediate feedback is more difficult now. Digital broadcasting, streaming and digital distribution chains mean that there is a significant delay between the presenter's desk output and the off-air feed. If you have ever heard your own voice coming back delayed, you will know how much this disrupts your speech. As a result the presenter has to listen to the local output of the station and can only check the off-air reception when they are not talking. Now we can use machines to detect things like long periods of silence and out of phase signals that can set off alarms or trigger corrective measures, but they won't tell you if the sound is distorted or muffled. In the end, many radio stations have to leave it up to the audience to complain if something is wrong, or just rely on the fact that modern equipment is so much less fault prone. For national stations with multiple transmitters this has always been the case.

The same issue turns up these days with conferences being held on-line or in hybrid form. If the people handling the on-line feed are not monitoring the result being delivered, then all sorts of problems can arise downstream that make for a dreadful audience experience. These can range from noise gating that cuts out parts of the speech to audio processing being left switched on that supresses important sounds like applause and music. While these settings might be useful on a normal Zoom or Teams call, they cut the audience off from the in-person atmosphere. You might think these sorts of things can be dismissed as rookie errors, however big media organisations have been known to screw up as well. I joined one call where the streamed audio was out of phase for nearly 20 minutes before someone fixed the problem.

It is then really refreshing when you find a group of people putting on a hybrid conference that has been thought through from an audience perspective, both in-person and on-line. The team that organises a small annual conference that I have attended recently use the online stream to feed a second room in the conference building. This is away from the main hall, where one or more of them can keep an ear and eye on what is being streamed. As a result, when things do go wrong with the stream, as they did with the sound this year, they could understand what the problem sounded like and attempt to rectify it, even if they were hampered by the fact that their tech person had gone sick on the day. They also go to great efforts to make sure the conference is a safe space for all participants with a quiet room for people to relax and a code of conduct. These are all things that the organisers of much larger events could learn from.

So, next time you are on the end of a poor quality on-line or hybrid event, ask the organisers if they are monitoring the on-line experience. If the answer is no, then the next question is "why not?" If a small volunteer team can do it then professional conference organisers have no excuse.