For some time now the city has struggled with the audio portion of the DVD recording of the council meeting. The audio portion of the meeting was and is of poor quality requiring volumes to be turned up to the maximum to hear. Even with that there is background noise or a hum.
The audio in the council chambers is great so we know most of the system is functioning fine. We also really didn’t understand this as the playback of the disk had reasonable sound on other devices. So we felt the playback in the rebroadcasting was the problem. Either their equipment was at fault or the playback volume level was set too low. Over the last few months we came to realize that this maybe a contributing factor but it seemed that the audio volume had further declined and needed to be addressed.
As we tried to solve the problem we tried a couple of different things that could be the cause such as a faulty plug-in or wire. This didn’t seem to do anything. We swapped out the DVD recorder to a different machine. Here we thought at first it was better with a louder audio but it really was not. We found a setting on the back of the machine which looked like it may work but it didn’t increase volume but rather dealt with another issue with the audio playback.
After calling our audio technician he suggested a few things which either didn’t work or wasn’t available on the equipment we have. He then suggested an audio amplifier to plug into the DVD recorder. We thought this would surely solve the problem.
The package finally arrived, after 3 weeks of waiting. The technician labeled everything so we knew exactly how to install it. We noted that the unit came with an adjustable gain and we hoped that the sound volume could even be increased to a level that could be too loud for playback.
After making the installation and testing the unit by recording at a number of different gain settings, the volume level seemed to be better at the highest setting. The playback however, using a different machine, was a very big disappointment. The playback volume doesn’t need to be set to the maximum level now, only slightly lower than that.
Our technician has been contacted and we had hopes he’d solve the problem for the July meeting but it appears that won’t happen. We’re uncertain where the problem lies and hope it can be remedied quickly, easily, and at a low cost. Our determination to fix the problem is there, my hope is we can solve the problem soon.
