Importance of Audio

How much do you think about audio when you are planning a conferencing event? You might spend days working on the PowerPoint and fine tuning dancing animations that introduce key points with movement and flair. You might type your whole script into the PowerPoint Notes field and do a spell and sentence check to make sure you have conveyed your text in a grammatically correct manner. You might read your speech to yourself, to your cat or to a co-worker that owes you a favor to try different phrasing techniques. You might practice in a conference room with co-presenters fine tuning details of who is going to speak when so it appears that you are bouncing things off one another in a natural manner. But did you do a sound check with the audio equipment you will use for your conference?

Phones are ubiquitous and we always assume when we turn the thing on, we are going to hear that, oh so familiar, dial tone. We love the phone because POTS always worked. It worked when you couldn't find your Mom after school, it worked when you were hungry and there was no pizza in the refrigerator and it even worked when the electricity went out. Even after we all got cell phones and experienced cell signals that cut out during very important communication moments, that didn't lessen our love affair.

And because love is blind, we have become very accepting of poor cell phone signals, cheap Bluetooth devices, dusty old speakerphones and soft phones that produce delays because our computer resources can't do VoIP and receive a fax at the same time. It's one thing to be accepting of this when we are having a casual conversation but when you are making a professional presentation you should tie that package up in a bow of the best sounding audio you can arrange.