My Audio Priorities: A Mobile Perspective

While I dabble in music production and love to nerd out about audio engineering, the fact is that the vast majority of my actual use for this stuff revolves around remote work, especially while traveling. This dual life gives me a somewhat unique perspective on audio hardware and software.

As a result, I place a heavy emphasis on factors like low latency and quick setup, while concerns like subtle distortion or out-of-band processing often fall by the wayside. This post is to explain those core audio priorities.

Things I really care about

1. Latency

   As a rule of thumb, you only get about 50 ms of total latency to play with. Unfortunately, 10-20 ms of that is typically consumed just by virtual audio interfaces and the DAW itself.

   Exceed that limit, and the lag between your audio and video becomes noticeable. This means any piece of hardware or any plugin introducing latency must be exceptionally good to justify the trade-off (e.g., Supertone Clear).

   On the other hand, since this is strictly for remote meetings, being slightly out of sync isn’t as critical as it would be for live music. And if you’re willing to deal with the hassle and resource usage, you can always run your video (and audio, if you want) through something like OBS to delay your video and bring them back into sync. You’ll be slightly delayed to everyone else in the meeting, but unless you’re going a bit crazy, it probably won’t be noticeable. That’s a bit much for me, though, so I care a lot about low latency.

2. Ease of use

   When you integrate complex audio processing into a meeting setup, you are adding a substantial level of complexity, meaning things can and will break. When it happens, it’s invariably at the worst possible moment (like right as the meeting starts), requiring you to fix it very quickly.

   Because of this, ease of use and the ability to get things up and running instantly are critically important. This instantly rules out many highly modular effects and mixing systems (e.g., MeldaProduction MXXX or IK Multimedia MixBox) for my primary workflow.

3. Audio quality

   This one’s obvious. If it doesn’t sound good, then what’s the point?

4. Portability

   When I’m at home, portability doesn’t really matter much. I can set things up, and mostly leave it that way for weeks or months at a time. I do occasionally need to grab my laptop and do a meeting somewhere other than my home office, so some level of portability is required, but it’s not a big deal.

   When I’m traveling, however, portability is paramount. I’m not only packing up my workspace every day, but I’m often moving locations multiple times throughout the day. In a typical day, I might have anywhere from one to six or more meetings, often attending them from at least two different locations. For example, in our motorhome, I handle short calls from the passenger seat and move to the bedroom for the longer ones. I need to be able to easily move my whole audio setup at a moment’s notice.

   As things stand right now, my whole physical setup that I need to haul around consists of: 1 laptop, 1 microphone, 1 USB-C cable (to connect the mic), and 1 Bluetooth headset. Anything beyond that is a bit of a hassle (and honestly, if I could find a cheap, low-latency, good-sounding, wireless mic, I’d use it).

   One way to simplify my physical setup further would be to rely solely on a wireless headset with a decent built-in mic. However, I gain a substantial amount of convenience from my current headset being light enough to wear basically all day, which would be difficult with a larger, heavier unit.

5. Price

   Family travel is expensive, which means I have to budget wisely for virtually everything else, especially my audio equipment and software. If I want or need something, I keep a patient eye out for a good deal; I basically never buy anything unless it’s on sale. Being patient often yields discounts of over 90% for certain plugins. Items that never go on sale are generally a hard pass for me.

6. Durability

   Since I’m constantly packing things up, getting them back out, moving it all around, etc., that quickly takes a toll on hardware, so I need to stick with things that are either durable, cheap, or ideally, both. As much as I’d love to rock a $3750 U87 for meetings, they aren’t exactly known for being durable (or cheap). From my laptop to my USB cables, I need equipment that will survive years of abuse.

7. Fun

   A lot of the stuff I mess with serves no practical purpose for me, but it sure is fun! I absolutely could get by with a simpler setup, but I find joy in experimenting with plugins, tweaking settings, etc. After all, life needs some whimsy.

Things I don’t care about at all

1. Hardware

   I just don’t have the space for lots of physical hardware. I can’t exactly bring a mixing console or rack of equipment with me on the road, so nearly everything in my arsenal is software-based.

2. Vintage hardware

   Most of the time, I prioritize clear sound with minimal fuss. It simply doesn’t matter to me if the compressor I use has that classic 1176 punch or if my EQ adds the extra “body” or saturation of a Pultec. I just need basic, functional sound-shaping capabilities.

   I’ll sometimes add just a hint of saturation, just because it’s pleasing to the ear, but I really don’t need to emulate some specific vintage preamp or something, just for the sake of a phone call. Ultimately, the audio quality in meeting software is low enough that most of that subtle vintage nuance would be lost anyway.

3. Physical instruments

   I like making music for fun, as does the rest of my family. I’m not good at it, but it’s fun. What’s not fun is taking up lots of space with instruments. When I’m on the road, I leave my Stratocaster in the closet at home, right next to most of my spoons and a few other guitars. Our steel drum is sitting in the living room at home, along with some maracas and some boomwhackers. We have to leave myriad instruments behind.

   That said, my family still loves making music, so we’ve still managed to find space for a few. Right now, I think we’re traveling with a small acoustic guitar, a guitarlele, some spoons, some small maracas souvenirs, a couple harmonicas, a Novation Circuit Tracks, and a Teenage Engineering EP-133. That may sound like a lot, but in terms of physical space, it’s nothing compared to what we leave behind, with lots of compromises in playability and sound.

   You know what doesn’t take up much space? Software instruments, especially synthesizers! Because we live in the future, I have hundreds of instruments and thousands of presets available at a moment’s notice, all inside my laptop.

4. ARA

   I like the idea of ARA (Audio Random Access) plugins. They let your DAW expose a full track to the plugin, rather than a simple audio stream, which opens up a lot of possibilities in the world of music production. This style of plugin is completely useless for anything live (like meetings and calls), though. I wish I could care about these, since it’s a cool idea, but I just can’t.

Things I kind of care about

1. Monitoring

   I can’t change my sound without knowing what I sound like. I need a basic ability to hear myself in a clean way that isn’t colored too much by my choice of headphones. A lot of nuance in sound is lost in remote meetings, though. And in the end, most people don’t really care. And because I’m nearly always the only person in a meeting going to weird lengths to improve my sound, it’s not hard to sound good, even with mediocre monitoring.

2. Flexibility

   Because everything has to happen in the box, I like to use more flexible tools, when I can. If I’m already using an EQ plugin that supports dynamic filters (e.g., FabFilter Pro-Q4 or TBT Kirchoff), then I might as well use it as a de-esser, too.

   I’ll definitely sacrifice some flexibility, in favor of usability or sound quality, though.

3. CPU usage

   Within reason, I don’t mind if a plugin is using a lot of system resources. If I’m making music, there’s probably a lot going on, and everything is fighting for resources. If I’m processing my voice, then there’s probably not going to be more than a half dozen plugins in the whole chain, so they aren’t exactly battling it out for an extra percent of CPU. That said, if I’m going to be running off my laptop battery for a while, I might stop and reconsider some of my plugin choices. For example, Sonible makes some pretty fantastic-sounding plugins, but they have a pretty noticeable impact on battery life. If I’m going into 3 hours of back-to-back meetings and I’m not near an outlet, I’m probably not going to use any of their plugins.

4. Storage size

   This is really more about music production than WFH audio, but I have to care at least a little about storage space. Given the emphasis on portability, relying on an external drive to hold terabytes of samples just isn’t feasible. My laptop has a fairly substantial drive, but I can’t afford to fill it with massive drum machine libraries or anything like that. As much as I’d love to use the entire UVI library or NI Komplete, it’s simply not an option. No giant IR-based reverb plugins for me, either.

   If I’m playing with software instruments, they are nearly always synthesizers, just because those take up so little space. Why have gigs of space dedicated to a collection of meticulously sampled e-pianos when I have hundreds of physically modeled options that take almost no space at all?

   The storage space is there for essentials, but it’s hard to justify downloading the 40 GB MeldwayGrand when Piano V clocks in at just 3 GB.