142 - How to improve your scanner's audio

Do you want to know how to improve your scanner’s audio? In this episode, Phil welcomes back Harrison Wilson to discuss sound quality with scanner radio setups. They discuss external speakers, how sound vibrations work, audio mixers, and more.   What You Need To Know Guest Harrison Wilson returns for his third guest appearance to talk about improving your scanner’s audio quality. A lot of scanner radios produce a tinny sound. To deliver all the features that customers want and keep manufacturing costs low, speaker and audio quality is what ends up suffering. As a firefighter, Harrison takes a tip for diagnosing water problems and applies it to audio: start at the source and work your way forward. Once you have good signal on your radio, the next step is adjusting the volume on your speaker. Understand how speaker resistance plays into your audio quality because sometimes it increases quality, and other times it can worsen it. Sound is a vibration, so what’s around your speaker can dramatically impact the sound. For people who want to listen to multiple scanner feeds at the same time, you can feed your signal into a mixer If your scanner has a line out jack, that’s typically better to use than a headphone jack. A sound mixer will allow you to fine-tune your audio, like adjusting treble and bass levels. Feeds may start to do something called clipping when the audio exceeds the bandwidth and the sound gets very distorted. It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole reading reviews and trying to find the ideal equipment but you’ll have more success searching for general tips for how to improve audio quality on what you already have.   All session notes with links to the items we talked about an be found on our website at www.scannerschool.com/session142 If you need help with your scanner and are looking for some one on one tutoring, I'd love to help you out.  Visit www.scannerschool.com/consulting to book your one hour appointment today! You can help support Scanner School by visiting our support page at www.scannerschool.com/support Don't forget to join us for our weekly net on Zello. For info, visit https://www.scannerschool.com/zello