Ask HN: Are people oblivious to their audio quality in meetings? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are people oblivious to their audio quality in meetings?

17 pointsleet_thow21 comments

You'd think by now folks would have invested in headsets or microphones.

I mean, you usually don't hear your own audio, so you're oblivious by default.

With video quality, you usually see a preview of what was captured locally, so at least you'll see terrible lighting or other really obvious image quality problems, but you won't see the results after encoding and decoding and you may not have a good understanding of the latency and jitter of your video sending either.

We strongly encourage that all of our remote employees use the same IP phone and headset models to help minimize this kind of problem. We pay for it all and try really hard to make sure everyone has it set up in the same way.

The kind of work we do is very complex and having people get distracted with random audio problems is just too much to deal with.

For those enthusiasts among us... I also think if you are fiddling with microphone preamps and phantom power before your daily standup, that you might have some unnecessary distractions going on in your office.

What headset models do you use?

Plantronics CS-series I believe.

Can attest to Poly (ex-Plantronics) headsets and their excellent microphone quality. Our entire team uses them and we lose no time to this sort of thing.

Yes. They are largely oblivious. I'm hard of hearing. The echo and distortion from most phones on hands-free, makes many people/environments completely incomprehensible to me. "I'm sorry I can't understand you. Are you on speakerphone?" Yes. They're on speakerphone. That they sound like they're shouting from the bottom of a well is a surprise to most when I tell them.

I'm not hard of hearing, yet I have the same issues.

About speakerphone, one pet peeve of mine is echo reduction algorithms. They basically turn the conversation into half-duplex. It means that in practice only one person can speak at a time which breaks many aspects of a natural conversation like interrupting each other or acoustically nodding to signify understanding.

I get it, hearing yourself in echo is atrocious, but so is half-duplex so please do your interlocutor a favor and turn off speaker.

I used a headset yesterday - and I had no idea if the sound was good / bad or great.

I tried to test the level using the zoom app - and it made me feel that the mic with the logitec H540 was not picking up as well as my older logi headset was.. but that could be the app not showing well or maybe it was showing fine and I was just used to / expecting it to give visual indicator all the way to the edge of the moving graphic when I raised my voice - but it did not..

I ended up using google meet - and did not get any complaints about being hard to hear.. but I really want some visual indicators to show me more info - and I guess a record and play back at different voice levels - would be nice to get an idea of how things would sound to those on the other end of a video call.

Of course what others hear will also depend if they are listening via headset, good or bad headphones, a laptop speaker or 3.1 system and such.

It seems that most people are spare-time podcasters where I work. They've all invested quite a bit.

Personally, I worry more about levels than actual clarity... mainly because positioning of this headset microphone is so sensitive

Finding a headset that's good at both output/input is difficult, and I really don't want a desk mic or some arm swinging about.

I'm thinking of switching to a USB ModMic if anyone has experience or trustworthy sources

Probably. The people who use professional quality studio microphones to send heavily compressed audio over Microsoft Teams also confuse me greatly.

When I switch to new hardware, I ask a coworker in slack how the quality is.

Nobody seems to notice any difference between:

MBP notebook mic, the mic in my logitech C920 cam, blue snowball, pixel buds, or AT2020 with pop filter.

So while I bristled (and laughed) at the "junior podcaster" remarks in this post, I seem to embody that trope AND have wasted a few bucks "investing" in my setup. :)

Was the Blue Snowball in mode 1, and were your lips within 2 inches of it?

The C920 has decent mic quality but, assuming you're using it for video, it needs to be some distance from your mouth, which affects audio quality.

That most consumer products, like TV sets, consoles, monitors - to this day - include barely listenable audio quality suggests that, yeah, audio is usually an afterthought. Youtube videos and podcasts seem to be having an effect on that, slowly. Muddy reverb that masks the listenability of irreplaceable interviews is getting rarer.

It’s not like pro audio where you’re going to have somebody listening to make sure the signal going out is good.

No one cares that much about audio quality; being able to hear the other person clearly and loud enough is usually fine for most meetings; everyone cares about video quality, though.

Has anyone tried antlion wireless mic? I hate wires.

https://a.co/d/f39vvon

Ethernet, wired mic, and background noise suppression fixes 99% of audio issues.

I don't really enjoy having anything attached to my head.

I use an set of iphone 4 headphones combined with a separate boom mic.

They have atrocious sound quality for music, but are fine for speech and I can wear them all day without discomfort.

I use an Elgato Wave:3 and AirPod Pros. Great combo.

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