Rejection for audible room echo - not so!
Just had a take rejected. The reason was spurious, 'audible room echo'. This was recorded in a $3000 whisper room sitting in a $20000 control room which produces national tv commercials daily. Clients with 5 figure budgets have no problem. You couldn't get a more treated dedicated space. The signal chain involves top-line preamps etc and is arranged and looked after by an audio engineer who has laughed at this being rejected! I am really upset and angry. Voicebunny's credibility and professionalism has really gone down in my opinion. To be clear, this was recorded in a top of the range high-spec professional studio on a TLM 103. Not a wardrobe with a duvet. What DO they listen to audio on and where do they listen to it? It is not enough to listen to audio on sony mdr 7506's as it introduces sibilance and can infer echo. Unless they're listening to audio on top-line monitors in a dedicated control room which is a treated space I don't buy it. I fail to agree they listen in an equal-quality space to my studio. It is not enough to monitor on cans, in any circumstances. Seriously considering my future with VB right now. #feeling let down, upset and annoyed. The quality and dedication I show VB is simply not reciprocated. Added to that the response I get is a stock standard rejection email which is not individualised or even has a name on it, so I can't have a conversation with the person who rejected it. This is the most impersonal aspect of voice bunny. If it wants professional relations with its clients (voiceovers not end-customers) it should start with more transparency. Did too many vo's sub for this job and I got the brunt by just being rejected? Something doesn't seem right.
Hi,
there is audible room echo (reverberation caused by your recording space) impacting your recording.
You’ll find tips on acoustic treatment on our Community page: https://goo.gl/vGqUIW . You’ll also find additional information there to help you achieve professional results.
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Hi, Liam
Sorry for the late reply. I've listened to your submission and perhaps the right word is not room echo, it's more like reflections. I've listened to it through both professional monitors and different sets of cans and by all means, it's not a bad quality sample. But as always, we strive to deliver the best audio quality to our clients and some of them do require a completely dry/dead sound, so that's why we are particular about this issue.
You mention you have a whisper room, so that's a great starting point. However, they also need to be acoustically treated. Here's a video which might help you in that regard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1A6mxsmRO4
I'm sorry you feel rejection notes don't feel personalized, we are currently tweaking them so they don't sound as stiff. It would be impossible to have conversations though, due to the sheer volume of submissions that we receive every day.
I urge you not to feel discouraged or upset by rejections, but rather see them as opportunities to continue improving.
Hope that gives you more insight into why these rejections happen.
Cheers,
-Seb
Thanks for your reply Seb I appreciate it, however I am afraid I respectfully disagree with you. A completely dry / dead sound is not indicative of quality nowadays and is in fact a representation of squashed audio that has had the life sucked out of it.
Quality audio should not sound like it has been recorded in a coffin. It should breathe. It shouldn't have reflections or echo of course, but I believe what you're asking for is a reduction in quality that I'm not prepared to compromise on.
I can assure you our recording studios here in the heart of England are state of the art, and I also listened to these samples in another engineer's control room. I'm a BAFTA nominated voiceover and audio engineer and I'm a trained sound engineer and acoustician and recently designed and installed a £100'000 sound suite for the audio tech department at Hallam University. To refer me to 'booth junkie's youtube channel' is indicative of the fact VB just doesn't know the talent it represents!
Could I ask what monitors you listened to the sample on, and what was the quality of the control room? I'm assuming it was a dedicated floating isolated control room with at least a range of full-spectrum monitors, because that's what I monitor on. If you ain't matching me then it's your equipment that's howling not mine! Different cans is not good enough; again VB shouldn't be QC'ing on cans at all. That's just not good enough from your end.
I know VB is having conversations with individuals at the moment about how to improve the QC. I'd love to be a part of this conversation. I think there are 3 crucial things to address;
i) State and list all equipment QC managers monitor on so we can do the same. That way we'll be monitoring and hearing what you guys are hearing. If we have to downgrade our monitoring equipment or change our practices then at least we'll know where to go to match your start-point. And we won't be in a situation where some QC guy listening on a pair of dodgy inappropriate cans is rejecting quality audio unnecessarily.
ii) Consistency of QC - Things like de-ess, compression etc is subjective and shouldn't be a reason for rejection given that the rule is 'don't compress'. The understanding is that no-one does it. So you shouldn't be hearing it. If people are breaking the rules in that way then a serious conversation needs to be had with those individuals. Sibilance is highly subjective, and (really for fvo's) if it's there in small amounts should be ok. This is for the producer / end user to fix. That's why you ask for clean unedited unprocessed audio. If it's there in spades then again theres clearly an issue with the talent that re-submitting isn't going to solve. Its a fundamental issue that should have been weeded out at the application stage.
iii) We're professionals; not fivverr voiceovers. A lot of us (me included) are doing this full time, all day. We deal with large multi-national corporations and national ad campaigns. VB is a tiny part of what I do that fills in the spare, and I know a lot of other vb talent use it in the same way. Trust us when we say we know our stuff. Treat us as such. Why not just do away with the QC process altogether? It's not there on V123 or other p2p sites. If a client has an issue they come back and we sort it asap. Or, if a sample is rejected then do make it personal, state why it was rejected and allow time for re-submission. Say a 30 minute window, if talent is sitting their studio right there and then it will be dealt with. It's not good enough to say 'we pride ourselves on high quality and speedy turnarounds' because if I get a job rejected what happens is that I can't reapply, and the job sits there for another 12 hours until someone else applies. I listen to that audio and it's far inferior quality to the one I submitted that was rejected because a different QC manager has approved it. So what the client gets is late, poor quality audio. If QC managers are so overwhelmed with submissions they don't have 30 seconds to be specific about why they rejected something and to allow a 30 minute window for re-submission then you need to hire more QC managers or hire better ones!
Happy to chew the fat over ideas how to make things better for everyone. There are clearly issues at VB that keep reappearing and aren't being dealt with over the years. A lot of talent are grumbling over the same issues on the facebook forums as well. And I assure you, the issue in the vast majority of cases is not the quality of our work; but rather the interface and the impersonal nature of the VB platform. What's most infuriating is that when we do speak to you guys personally or via email, you guys are super friendly, super helpful and really nice! You guys are awesome when we do get to speak with you! And some of you guys really know your stuff. The bunny community is a really friendly place and everyone just wants the same thing, to do great work. Just get rid of the unnecessary divide that has been created between QC and talent. Cheers,
Liam