Listening fatigue: how bad audio quality burns out your audience 

Listener fatigue is a very common problem, and it’s not just online content creators who can have problems with it. You might have seen the headlines about Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. Even Nolan, a multi Oscar award winning director and producer, gets complaints from his audience about having to work too hard to make out what characters are saying.

It might sound obvious, but being able to hear what people in your content are saying is really important. The more difficult it is for your audience to make out what you’re saying, the harder they have to work to stay focused. This can quickly lead to listener fatigue for your audience.

Listener fatigue is exactly what it sounds like. When people have to work too hard to listen to your content they start feeling tired and their hearing can become less sensitive. Sometimes listening fatigue can even lead to discomfort and pain. All of these are likely to make your audience switch off and stop listening to what you have to say.

So what exactly causes listener fatigue and how can we, as content creators, deal with it? In this article we take an in-depth look at how low-quality audio can make it worse, and how you can avoid the problem in your content.