The German media company behind podcasting the True Crime Hannover series for the daily newspaper Neue Presse, TVN Corporate Media, has worked as a full-service partner throughout – with five seasons to date attracting more than 900,000 downloads/streams, giving it top billing in the genre charts on Apple and Spotify.

Part of the TVN Group, TVN Corporate Media has been successfully active in the field of audiovisual production for many years.

‘Our services range from format coordination and the selection of topics and hosts, including booking and contract management, to complete production processes, including sound design, creation of the cover image and publication on target platforms,’ says Rolf Rosenstock, Creative Director of Corporate Audio. ‘We create distinctive identities that match the individual concept: intros, outros, stingers and jingles.’

At the end of April 2024, the sixth season of was recorded at a TVN Group studio in Hannover. The format is the most successful podcast produced by the Madsack Mediengruppe, which owns both the and TVN Group Holding with its subsidiaries.

All True Crime Hannover seasons – each six episodes long – were conceived, written, recorded, mixed, mastered and published by TVN Corporate Media under Rosenstock’s direction. In the five seasons produced since 2021, Neue Presse employees discuss factual criminal cases from the Hannover region.

Regular studio guests include lawyers, forensic doctors, police officers and psychiatrists, who use their expertise to put even the most unusual human dramas into perspective with authoritative contributions from their fields.

One of those supporting Rosenstock in producing the podcast is postproduction specialist Alexander Kollmeyer, whose workplace in the company’s sound studio in the company’s Hannover offices. The control room is equipped for Dolby Atmos productions with a 5.1.4 loudspeaker set-up, including an elevated playback level. The equipment installed here includes nine bi-amplified Neumann KH 120 two-way monitors with integrated class-AB amplifiers. In the studio, the podcasts are mixed in stereo rather than in multichannel formats such as Dolby Atmos or Auro-3D.

For the podcasts, voices are captured using dynamic Sennheiser MD 46 reporter’s microphones via external preamps before being passed at 48kHz, 24-bit resolution to DAW. Mixing and mastering are both ‘in-the-box’, using various plug-ins without additional peripheral equipment.

Kollmeyer is in the enviable position of having access to an extensive pool of microphones available for TVN Live Production’s OB work, including MKH condenser models and ‘classic’ dynamic microphones such as the MD 441-U or MD 421-II. Various Neumann mics are also available for all kinds of applications.

‘When I’m working in the studio with professional speakers, I always like to use large-diaphragm microphones such as the Neumann U 87 Ai or a model from the Neumann TLM series ‘, he says. ‘But for the podcast production, I chose the Sennheiser MD 46, because it’s perfectly suited for this job.’

Mobile dividing walls, soft furniture and carpets are used in the recording studio to create a pleasant living room atmosphere for the podcasts. ‘We want our guests to feel comfortable – after all, these are people who rarely have to deal with recordings and might sometimes be a bit nervous,’ Rosenstock says. ‘It was therefore all the more important for us to create an atmosphere for the speakers to have a relaxed conversation – and this ultimately benefits their performance. Soon after they start talking, most guests have forgotten that they are being recorded.’

From a sound engineering perspective, dividing walls, soft furniture and carpets produce dry room acoustics that helps provide good speech intelligibility.

Using the same microphone type for all guests is a deliberate choice: ‘Each type of microphone has its own characteristics, and I want to ensure that all persons are treated equally in terms of acoustics and that no-one is given preference based on the sound of their microphone,’ Kollmeyer explains. ‘In podcast recordings, I’m not a fan of the proximity effect and I attach great importance to making the recording sound as natural as possible, which, in my opinion, can also include the occasional slight background noise. If everything is ruthlessly ‘ironed out’ during postproduction, the overall sound can seem too sterile. For podcasts, I don’t try to achieve a typical radio sound, which to a certain extent is a matter of taste. Personally, I just don’t like it when the bass components of voices are over-emphasised when people are speaking.

‘We don’t have trained speakers with professional microphone discipline in the studio for our podcasts,’ he continues. ‘Our guests often move around quite naturally in their armchairs, which means that the distance between their mouth and the microphone is constantly varying. If we used the type of close-miking that is common in radio broadcasting, that would lead to problems.’

‘For me as a host, it’s important that I can focus entirely on the conversation and my guests. I don’t want to have to worry about whether the sound is OK,’ Rosenstock says. ‘At TVN, we are committed to providing the best possible sound quality – and our customers expect that, too. I’m really pleased to have a proven expert like Alexander Kollmeyer at my side for the production of our podcasts.’

Kollmeyer has favoured Sennheiser mics and headphones for more than 30 years: ‘I have a musical background and still play drums in a band. I’ve been able to gain a lot of experience with Sennheiser microphones over the past three decades and these were always positive in very different contexts. My band was supported early on by Michael Polten, who at that time was head of the Music Industry team at Sennheiser. I can clearly recall the first time I put on a pair of Sennheiser HD 25 headphones, which immediately became my favourite model – I ended up wearing them all the time.’

For podcast production, guests in the TVN studio can choose to use Sennheiser HD 280 Pro headphones, which are very comfortable to wear with their soft ear pads and are easy to handle with their single-sided cable. These dynamic around-the-ear stereo headphones feature highly detailed, linear sound reproduction and good attenuation of ambient noise.

Podcasts like True Crime Hannover often focus on victims and their families, without giving due consideration to their privacy or their suffering. What is more, the selection of cases and the way that they are presented runs the risk of producing a tendentious image of crime. This type of selective representation can promote stereotypes and misconceptions about crime and create a narrative that suggests that the victims themselves are responsible for their situation (‘victim blaming’).

TVN Corporate Media is well aware of this problem: ‘We asked ourselves how we could do it differently and better,’ Rosenstock says. ‘For that reason, we invite experts who can put the topic into the right perspective. We also provide information on where victims can find help and support, and it is often the case that we have family members as guests who are prepared to talk openly about their feelings. It is clear that, with a topic like this, we also have to examine the psyche of the perpetrators, but this perspective is not our main focus. We prefer to put detailed questions to an investigator who can shed some light on the matter or who perhaps even helped to successfully solve a case.’

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