ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on one of the most important aspects of an editor's life, and it is strangely not the vision. Whereas the eye can be very forgiving about what it sees, the ear is always supercritical of what it hears, which means the authors just have to get the sound right. With audio the authors have the ability to mix different sources together that can sound absolutely dreadful, be technically untransmittable, or indeed just be downright bad, and the software does not give a damn and will happily let us get on with it. Traditional nonlinear editing rooms, especially if they are primarily used for cutting offline material, are too often equipped with less than perfect sound monitoring. To start with, the room in which we are working should be sound-treated, at least with carpets, soft furnishings, and curtains, so that unwanted reflections and standing-wave effects are minimised.
