Suharu Ogawa for NPR

The producers, reporters and engineers who create the audio stories we love make a lot of magic happen behind the scenes. In seamlessly stitching together discrete pieces of audio, they can craft rich scenes that transport listeners.

But being an audio editing wizard is not enough to tell great stories. You also need to have highly “trained ears” that can identify distracting problems in audio recordings that get in the way and distract from the message.

Asking the experts
NPR Training’s Rob Byers and two NPR audio engineers took audio production questions during a reddit AMA.

We’ve created a guide to common audio problems that’s worth digging into if you want to learn more about public radio and podcast production. It lays out two dozen of the most common audio problems and how to hear, fix and prevent them.

Want to see if you have the ears of an audio producer? Take this quiz and put your skills to the test!

Listen to the three audio examples and identify the one with the audio problem in question.

(Headphones recommended.)

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If you loved this, you might also enjoy the original quiz it was built on: How well can you hear audio quality? from our friends at NPR Music.