How do you overcome the client issue where they presume they know the difference and that they care about audio quality, but they don't?
ASKED BY · Jeff Cohen · MIAMI BEACH, FLORIDA · 16 SEP 2026 · ▶ 00:55:17
Acknowledged the problem where professional quality bars are higher than client expectations; sometimes clients are satisfied with lower quality.
When working through platforms like Riverside on client content, sometimes constraints exist where talent can't be moved to better rooms; apply all available techniques to improve what's possible within those limits.
Educate clients if compensation allows; show improvement over time across episodes; if clients won't engage in education, accept their lower standards or redirect energy to work that's more fulfilling; evaluate whether the relationship needs improvement.
Summarised by AI from what the panel said. Watch the moment for the full answer.
From the transcript.
Machine-transcribed, so it may contain errors. Every timestamp opens the episode at that second.
54:56Jeff? Yeah, just that this is the first time seeing it and all I got is a basic your link and the page. So it's going to take a lot more research and probably using it to see what it does and whether we like it. All right. Next question. Jeff Cohen in Miami Beach, Florida asks, how do you overcome the client issue Tim McCullough
55:19raised in chat that presumes they know the difference and that they care about it? Jeff, what do you have to say? Yeah, and this came up with the audio level thing. You know, obviously, lots of folks very appropriately said the correct answer, which is, well, they have to just do it correctly, of course. But Tim is certainly right where sometimes we probably all encounter this where our quality bar is higher than the client's quality bar.
55:55And, you know, we don't want it to be down here. We want it to be here. But they're fine with it being, you know, okay. So that's the question. What's the answer, Mickey? Yeah, I think number one here is to educate. Assuming you're being compensated enough to go through the whole process of educating them, then, yeah, teach them, like, this is what we want.
56:23This is what we want to go for. If they don't care, then I don't know if this is a, if you're being paid enough, then stick with it. Just accept the garbage and publish their garbage if this is a podcast or air their garbage. if this is live and that's on them if they don't if they don't really care about it but if you can
56:46if you're able to go through the process of educating and then you know work through them show them try to show them the the improvement as you go along through that whole process of improving things every single show that you do improve improve improve and show them like Remember last week where you just sounded like a muscled person in the garbage can?
57:09Now you don't. If they're unwilling to go through that process with you, first off, there might be something in that relationship that needs to be improved for them to trust you, to go through that whole education process. If not, it's time to maybe see if you can put your time into something else that you can be more fulfilled with in terms of your work.
57:43Yeah. I know that with our clients, quite often by the time I am sent to do a recording, and again, we do a lot of stuff on Riverside, I have to ask the producers, how much am I allowed to push these people? Like, can I tell him to move to another room? No, he's in the room he's going to be in. It's going to be what it is.
58:06I'm like, okay. And then we apply all the tricks that we can do to make it be a little bit better. And people have decided that this is as much as we're willing to do. A lot of times you've got to remember, sometimes you're dealing with people that are – sometimes the recordings that we are doing are customers of our client and our client doesn't want to push them too far
58:35they're doing us a favor so anyway that's it for this week of The Grill I want to thank the panel let's see the panel here thank you everybody for giving your mornings and being a part of this is that everybody? is that all of us? I don't think Alexander's in that frame that's bogus close up of Alexander or I'm not doing the rest of the show.
59:00Okay, now we're all in the frame. Thanks for being here. Thank you for the back-end crew. Thanks for every... Yeah, we saw Mickey in the last one. Thanks to the back-end crew for everything that you guys do. We'll be back next Wednesday with audio, but there's stuff every day, so talk to you later. Boom, right on time. Roll those credits. We're going to be down 60 minutes exactly, folks.