Sound matters more than picture, and it is not close

People forgive a soft image and leave over bad audio, so spend the effort accordingly.

Watch what an audience actually tolerates. A slightly dim, slightly soft picture is barely remarked upon. Audio that echoes, clips, drifts in and out or sits under a hum will empty a session, because listening through it is genuinely tiring and the effort is not repaid. Poor sound also destroys comprehension in a way that poor picture does not: a viewer can follow a fuzzy speaker, but nobody can follow a sentence they could not hear. Effort spent on audio buys more than the same effort spent anywhere else.

The improvements that matter are unglamorous. Get the microphone close to the speaker rather than across the room, because distance is what lets the space into the recording. Treat the room a little: soft furnishings, curtains, anything that stops sound bouncing off bare walls and glass. Turn off the sources of continuous noise you have stopped noticing, from fans to notifications. Use headphones so the audience's sound does not loop back through the speaker's microphone. Each is small, and together they are the difference between listenable and abandoned.

Then check it with ears, not indicators. Record a minute of ordinary speech, listen back on headphones, and listen for the things a meter will not show you: the room ringing behind the voice, sibilance, a level that rises and falls as the speaker turns their head. Do this before the day, not during it, because the audio problems that surface live are almost never fixable live without stopping the session entirely.