Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

Use your laptop's microphone.

So you can make everyone else on the call suffer your horrible audio quality instead (room echo, etc.)? Probably not the smartest option when trying to get Management to get comfortable with work from home.

> So you can make everyone else on the call suffer your horrible audio quality instead (room echo, etc.)?

No you're confused - the point is it's better quality.

There's no limited bandwidth, and it's physically a larger microphone than the very limited micro one in your headset. It picks up the same background noise that its geometry can't eliminate, and can do the same processing to try to remove it.

Wouldn't the signal to noise ratio be better on earphones as they are relatively closer to your mouth and are "dampened" by your body as opposed to on a laptop where it's more likely to pick up keyboard/fan/environment noise as it's closer to those and has no/very little vibration dampening?

Doesn't seem to overcome the bandwidth or microphone quality - try it yourself! Quality is clearly better for me.

Not only that, many laptops and tablets nowadays use microphone arrays, not just one - so get better quality from that. Also there's no time lag. Half the people dialing into meetings in airpods at my company have a very noticeable delay for their audio to come out when they start speaking. It's difficult to not accidentally interrupt them.

I’m not confused. I understand the concept of the wireless bandwidth that’s needed for the bidirectional communication when in headset mode vs headphone mode. My point is that the laptop microphone arrays are just not as good as a microphone that’s designed to be right next to your mouth, or at least within 6 inches. The mic arrays on laptops almost always sound worse than headsets.

> My point is that the laptop microphone arrays are just not as good as a microphone that’s designed to be right next to your mouth, or at least within 6 inches.

Those are tiny microphones in your headset, and there's only two of them, sending back a mono signal! A MacBook Pro has an array of three much larger, higher-quality microphones, with high SNR and directional beamforming and the ability to do proper noise cancellation. They're also on a hardware bus to your system. The microphones in a headset just don't compete.

Try it yourself!

All I can say is that when you’re on the other end of a call with someone using the laptop array, vs a headset, the quality of sound from the laptop array is objectively much worse than the headset. You hear room noise, echo, etc. It’s definitely not as bad as older laptop mics that didn’t have noise cancellation, etc. but it’s still worse than a headset.

Better still get a <$50 USB microphone on Amazon that has a stand for it and use that. Enjoy everybody on video calls asking if you are some famous streamer.

I bought a $25 USB webcam and I constantly get comments for how nice my video and audio is. I just got the first one that is supported in linux.

It has rudimentary autofocus and a microphone that handily beats everything that is built in to my other devices.

$25, decent lighting and sitting in a room with lots of fabric in it was all it took to be a video conference king.

What is the model number?

I am not at home at the moment, so I don't know. The webcam is branded AngeTube and has a ring light. It was something like $50 at full price, but could be had new from Tradera (a swedish auction site) for as little as 200sek.

I also don't work in tech, so the video quality bar wasn't set very high by my colleagues.

Thank you!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com