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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

The biggest thing that leads to this, I think, is bad audio. Listening to shitty scratchy laptop microphones -- or even the comparatively-excellent Apple array microphones -- is deeply fatiguing. I notice a distinct difference in energy expended when I'm on a call with people who have low/zero background noise and decent-quality microphones, and others have noted that about me (as I'm also an audio engineer in my spare time and tend to have pretty good audio and video in teleconferences).

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During a job interview I was asked to teach something off the cuff. There were two interviewers in the meeting, so I decided to show the difference that a good mic with good placement can have on call quality. Switched from my nice mic that was one shaka[0] away, to the laptop mic that was about two arm lengths away (maybe 8 shaka’s). They were shocked at the difference and one asked “is that what I sound like right now?”

I went on to discuss how sound intensity is inverse to the square of the distance, so double the mic distance and it’s 1/4 the intensity. So the distant mic was picking up ~1/64th the volume. When there isn’t much of a difference between my voice and room echoes it becomes hard to listen to.

They started a discussion about how much it would cost to outfit everyone with external mics after that haha. For anyone wondering, even a cheap lapel or broadcast mic that’s close to your face will sound much better than a distant laptop, due to the comparative volume of your voice verses the environment.

[0] One shaka, or one “hell yeah” is a unit of measure an audio engineer shared with me once. Extend your thumb and pinky, and get your mic about that far from your mouth for good sound. One or two shaka’s is generally very good.

All you really need is a proper headset with boom mic. Either USB or one with a proprietary dongle because 2-way bluetooth audio sounds terrible. I would think it's pretty common for companies to issue everyone a headset these days.

My company issued everyone headsets, and the audio is night-and-day difference, but maaaaaaan I hate wearing a headset.

I wish. I take some amount of pride in having pretty solid video and audio for meetings. I get stuck with people using their awful macbook microphones and webcams, and most don't bother with headphones.

Then they wonder why everyone hates meetings.

One of the nice upsides of a good microphone is that it can make headphones optional instead of required. I usually take meetings on speakers. But my desk mic is a sE Electronics Dynacaster with tremendous rejection and, coupled with a hardware mute switch and teleconferencing's now-pretty-excellent echo cancellation, nobody can tell.

But I also own IEMs that I use if I'm giving a presentation, so I can get the necessary direct monitoring to ensure I'm on-point with my audio.

Headsets are fine but many of the folks wearing them call in, which completely negates their benefit. Also, they're uncomfortable IMO

You'd be surprised. At work we get some nice-ish jabra headsets and most people wear them.

But I regularly have to take calls with people from other companies, and one in particular comes to mind where some dude never ever wears a proper headset, or doesn't know how to configure it or something [0]. We can always hear the people around him going about their business.

Then there's also the fact that people insist on using bluetooth headsets and wifi, so the audio goes in and out when it doesn't sound like a robot.

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[0] I've complained once to somebody about being unable to hear them. They said they were wearing a headset, but, as it turned out, Teams was using the laptop's integrated mic instead.

The jabra headsets seem to insist on Bluetooth when in calls, reducing the quality back down to terrible

It needs to be a model with a dedicated dongle if you're going wireless. Otherwise for 2 way audio they switch to the Bluetooth phone call profile that hasn't improved for like 20 years.

I use a Sennheiser/EPOS DECT headset. I'd only recommend the Sennheiser ones for DECT because they have an ultra-wideband mode that actually sounds pretty good. Otherwise you're going to sound like a cordless phone.

Watch out, most Jabra headphones with dongles are actually bluetooth as per the specs. Or does the dongle do something regular BT can't do?

This was driving me crazy when I was looking for one a few months ago. Ended going with a wired Poly (the DECT models were absurdly expensive for my needs).

I do have a DECT Jabra model (with a huge base) which is nice enough for conference calls, and the mic doesn't sound noticeably worse than the newer, wired model we have at work. The headphones do have a somewhat tinnier sound, bur for conferencing they're very good as long as nobody with a deep voice breaks out some Shure mic.

The killer feature for me is the very, very low latency. I'm a non-competitive non-hardcore gamer, but I'm happy to use it in FPS games.

It also wipes the floor with bluetooth range-wise. During covid I had it at my parents' thick-walled house and it allowed me to walk around the garden during calls with no interruptions. BT can't handle me going in the next room in my small apartment.

I don't know the technical specifics but I've had a Logitech and Sennheiser BT headset with dongle. I'm pretty sure the dongle is Bluetooth but it is definitely doing something out of spec because there's a huge difference in quality between dongle and direct Bluetooth.

And yea DECT is pretty nice. I also use it for gaming occasionally.

Fortunately, they didn't drink the wireless kool-aid when purchasing these, so we have wired-only versions.

Throwing in probabilistic latency and some occasional distortion and I think the fact that it almost works well enough some or most of the time makes it _worse_: instead of just getting used to a certain base rate of distortion like one might with a walkie-talkie or lossy landline, you end up constantly on edge, uncertain if you're going to fall out of sync and start talking over someone else, asking people to repeat things again and again-- it's punishments on a randomized reward schedule, a slot machine that deals out miscommunication that the communicating parties can't control or mitigate by changing their behavior.

I'm going to lose control and smash my macbook one of these days.

No one should be using built in audio IO on their laptops. A proper headset, with a relatively nice attached mic should be considered minimum viable equipment for VoIP calls, and companies should as such supply them, just like they do laptops.

What’s sad is that the relatively expensive and high end apple Bluetooth headsets also sound awful.

Blame Bluetooth blame whatever, but AirPods Pro and AirPods Max should sound incredible at their price point. And they just don’t. They sound obviously filtered and robotic.

And also the latency they add is a problem.

AirPods do sound quite acceptable if you're on a phone, I think. There's something weird about how they interact with macOS.

I don't understand why companies don't invest in this. It doesn't seem that expensive to provide headsets, I'm already getting an expensive MacBook.

I had a colleague ask me of I had sound conditioning in my office and I felt so seen. Bad audio is like nails on a chalkboard to me.

Absolutely. My office is in a basement. The walls are all 5/8" drywall with 3.5" of rockwool inside, plus 6" of rockwool in the rafters above the drop ceiling. And that's before I get to the sound treatment on the actual walls.

People lose their minds when they hear the raw recordings from the vocal booth that's directly behind my work desk. And it was just a closet before, outfitting it just wasn't that expensive.

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