Sound engineering

The word an English speaker misreads most confidently in a German studio is der Hall. It is not a room. It is reverberation — the sound that carries on after the source has stopped — and at the desk it usually means the effect that adds it: mehr Hall auf die Stimme asks for more reverb on the vocal, not for a bigger venue. The building is der Saal or die Halle; the corridor outside is der Flur. The word keeps its meaning through the family: hallen is to resound, and a mix that is verhallt has been drowned in reverb. Once that is settled, the rest of the list reads the way an engineer thinks, as a chain of causes: something sounds mulmig or hums, and the only useful question is what it is down to — woran es liegt.