Zoom bias: The social costs of having a 'tinny' sound during video conferences
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Only if you don't try to wear it.
Every now and then (once every 1-2 weeks) it drops off of the list of inputs on OSX but unplug and plug it back in usually fixes that.
Listen to a bunch of the shotgun mics on youtube and see which your voice might sound the best with.
Frequently available for $50 and supports live headphone pass through if that’s your jam.
As a bonus, it has a hardware mute button on it. Now I usually leave my Zoom unmuted, and use the button to toggle whether my coworkers can hear me. It's more convenient than clicking the Zoom button or finding the keyboard shortcut.
There are a few modern improvements on it, such as the Yeti X.
The USB connector is not an issue for me, because the mic is connected to a docking station/computer display.
The sound quality hasn't been an issue yet, and I've used it to record some game assets, etc...
Have you used Yeti X? If so, how does it compare to Blue in practice?
Shotgun mics popular among low-budget filmmakers (think: people who shoot local commercials, little indie films and shorts, and, when desperate for cash, weddings) would also be a good and fairly cheap way to go, though they may require other hardware to function.
Going the dynamic mic route can end up costing a bit more, but worth it in my opinion. Unless you have a very quiet environment and don’t need to type on a keyboard or click a mouse while on calls.
Possibly Jitsi doesn’t do it as well as Zoom or Google Meet, so my experience on Jitsi was a night and day improvement switching from Blue Yeti (cardioid mode) to a dynamic mic.
The software is also surprisingly useful, and includes a mixer and real-time-audio effects which are expensive to do outside of the software on macOS.
Def use the mic with a pair of wired headphones/earbuds to use the live/direct monitoring feature.
My team used to have a lot of issues with people mics being too loud or too quiet without realizing. Getting everyone on that mic and specifically using direct monitoring has solved that issue.
https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/products/streaming-gear/yeti...
It works better if you're really close, but .5-1m away still sounds fantastic (I work from a 3x4m sized room, with some outside noise).
Cons: it's quite big
Agree that the best mics for speech are headsets that tightly control the position of the mic.
These are about $1,000 and look (though looks may be deceiving) shockingly easy to accidentally destroy, to save anyone wondering a Google.
Though that might say as much for the company provided mic as it does for the BC ones!
The professional equipment sounds the best, but the audio device alone (sans mic) was $1200.
These days, I use the pencil mic with a Scarlett device. It sounds good enough for my recording needs (I post-process everything regardless). It is out of camera, and pencil mics (or shotgun) are what pros use in camera studios.
If you don't mind having a big mic on camera, the Fifine is a lot of bang for the buck. If you are a brand person, go for the Shure.
A headset is great for minimizing sound when talking with others (say for a podcast interview), but I have yet to find one that is comfortable for using all day (I'm often teaching day-long courses).
The average software salary in the US is about $10k a month. Few spend that much on audio equipment.
also original post only actually recommends $100 - $200 mics, so this entire subthread has been a bumbling series of utter nonsense
The "podcaster mics" will work too but they are designed to be pulled up to your face. If you don't want the mic in camera then you will not get great results with them.
Wouldn't really call it an investment.
Audio gear is surprisingly complicated for non-experts to research, evaluate and monitor. (Like even making sure your app is using it, and didn't reset to your laptop mic when you accidentally unplugged it for a minute.)
And fixing your lighting can require rearranging your entire office if you have a window behind you. Or investing in expensive blinds, etc.
Anyone got the setup already in front of them at their zoom desk and want to make us a 5 minute comparison video?
Apple has some of the WORST quality microphones - mostly due to the fact that they have zero headset with boom mics.
It's webcams (Logitech shit) and headsets that are the worst.
If you have it off to the side and aren’t sitting pretty close it will sound like butthole
Proper positioning is pretty important.
I run an HD obsbot camera and a great mic. I am fully convinced it helps.
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That, and the new Macbook Pro's portrait mode feature on the webcam. It's good enough that most people won't want to bother with setting up a DSLR
My rank order for investment:
1. Mic - See my mic comment in another thread
2. Lighting - It is hard for good cameras to compensate for poor lighting. Good lighting on the other hand, does compensate and helps laptop webcams perform much better. I currently run a Godox ULC60bi with a huge parabolic diffuser. Probably overkill for many. You can get cheap fluorescent or LED lights with a diffuser. Would avoid a ring light especially if you wear glasses.
3. Camera - I have used Canon M50 and Sony A6500 as webcams. These days, I use an Insta360 Link. It's not quite as good as the cameras (you can add more "background blur" with their software), but it's more convenient. I still get compliments on this.
4. Background - Blur, doors, and bedrooms are what you see 90% of the time. A good background helps you stand out. I have a bookcase with the books ordered in color. Folks always comment about it. There are lots of other common looks, look on Youtube or X (Kevin Shen) for office makeovers.
5. Teleprompter - Not for scripts but for "looking in the eyes" of my students or the person on the other end of the call.
What teleprompter do you use? How do you use it?
0. https://www.amazon.com/FUDESY-Collapsible-Auto-locking-Green...
Here's my setup.
https://x.com/__mharrison__/status/1901829114417602569/photo...
Teleprompter is a GlideGear.
It is a Glide Gear teleprompter with an Insta360 Link for a camera, custom foam draping, and a Lilliput 8-inch monitor. It is attached to my monitor mount with a swing arm, and some adapted camera gear (inspired by some YT video) that allows me to adjust its vertical and level position of it relatively easily.
Maybe I should have stuck with it and iterated! Sounds like you've dialed it in.
I'm the creepy instructor who looks at his students rather than talking to you by looking down and to the right...
More seriously, I have dialed it in because I think it gives my clients a better final product. I also just want to have things work rather than spending an inordinate amount of time setting up equipment each time I need to record.
I wear glasses, and having a ring in the middle of them would drive me crazy when editing videos. Also, staring at a computer screen with lights off to the side is bad enough for me, I don't know how you can look directly into the light. Finally, it isn't compatible with my camera being behind the teleprompter.
Most lighting folks recommend putting one light to the side (say 45 degrees) so that one side of your face is lit and the other has a shadow. Fancier folks have additional fill light to highlight the shaded side and the back of the head (so there is a glow around it).
True on the first part, but bookshelves as backgrounds are so cliche. Every two bit hack who gives an opinion on TV has a bookshelf as the background. It's a negative signal for me.
Every book and item has been carefully selected to produce a specific image about the person.
I just use a Severance themed overlay :)
Sadly, we had a second child and we put a cot into the room, so I can't have my books behind me anymore :(
I find it even more useful when recording courses. I use OBS to overlay my face when talking about code. I immediately notice when folks try to do this without a teleprompter. They keep gazing off to the side.
There are yt tutorials about making cheap teleprompters. You could try it out and see if you care for it. I made two, however the value in a real teleprompter is the sturdiness and the mount. It was easier for me to buy one than hack one up that I would be using everyday.
Use the laptop microphone as the input instead, or if no microphone is present just buy an external microphone. You probably don't need a $300 podcast-class microphone since the audio still gets compressed in transit, though.
A decent mic will still outperform.
For the love of everything, use something standalone. Ideally not a desk mic. Vibration works against those... just like what's built into any given laptop. It's a form-factor/usability thing.
Decent audio isn't a price problem, it's entirely about selection. What you suggest is my last choice. A backup.
Headsets and forgive me, wires I can replace, are hard to beat. I like to type, talk, and be heard. Sometimes all at once.
The degree to which vibration of is a problem depends on your setup. If your laptop is mounted on a VESA arm bolted to your desk and you’re typing on an external keyboard for example, it’s not going to come through too easily, especially if you have the keyboard placed on a desk pad. This is true of a standalone mic on an arm too.
Misunderstands the value of a good mic. That's like saying DSLRs and flip phones take the same quality photos if you are compressing them down to 400x400 JPEGs
You'd be surprised at how many companies/etc issue laptops that don't handle background noise for anything, even the fan on the laptop itself.
That said I've been using one or two variants of a gaming headset with dedicated receiver for the last 5-ish years. (Before that I used Logitech H800s with the dedicated receiver, alas the earpieces disintegrated after a decade or so.) Better audio quality and at the time were only 100$ on sale.
Especially if you are in an open office or pit style setting, bluetooth just has too many issues to be reliable/good for wireless audio.
It's honestly a pet peeve of mine when people consistently lack audio etiquette. Communication is a huge part of our job, remote work is a godsend for work-life balance, it should be the bare minimum to just mute yourself when you're not talking and in general being mindful how much sound interruptions you're repeatedly causing in group meetings.
A lot of business conference headphones have a boom mic, as well as gaming headphones, but they all cheap out on the actual microphone element. For ideal sound quality you want to get a V-Moda BoomPro (wired, $20) or an Antlion ModMic Wireless ($140). These tack onto your existing headphones with a small magnetic clip (so you can take it off when not in a call). You can look up sound quality comparisons on YouTube, these two devices are far ahead of even the most expensive business/gaming headsets. It makes a vast difference in sound quality.
The ModMic Wireless also works around the "Bluetooth sound quality is shit in headset mode" issue, since your headphones are in output-only (A2DP) mode and the ModMic has its own separate Bluetooth connection for mic-only.
Finally, camera quality and lighting are important too. Here's a good article on lighting: https://languageoflight.blog/2020/10/08/time-zooms-by/. For the camera you can use an actual camera (DSLR/mirrorless, ideally with a fast lens) with an HDMI capture card, there's plenty of info about this available on the internet. An old iPhone can also work quite well afaik? Either way, it'll be much better than a webcam, particularly if your room's lighting conditions aren't ideal.
The ModMic comes with a tiny magnetic nub that adheres (permanently) onto the headphones. Then the ModMic itself snaps onto / off of that magnetic element, so it takes literally 2 seconds to take it on/off.
An inexpensive omnidirectional lav can sound good for much less money and much more reliably than complicated software-steered mic arrays or even desktop mics with various pickup patterns can in the hands of an average consumer because the source audio, proportionally, is so much louder than any background or room noises due simply to distance. Because of the inverse-square law, every time you halve the distance between source and mic you get 4 times the acoustic power, so much better signal to noise ratio.
Real situations exist where simply putting the microphone closer to the mouth isn’t good enough to solve the problem on its own, and that’s why stage microphones have those pickup patterns that reject more noise but require some technique to use. That’s not the reality for most people giving a presentation on their laptop, though.
Even at the higher end of closed back headphones, there is a still a decent bit of noise leak.
I've Had V-Moda mic in the past, as well as Sennheiser and Beyerdynamic headsets with boom mics.
It usually isn't a problem with the relatively low volumes in a meeting, but any other time the noise leak is enough to get reliably picked up on recordings etc...
Assuming that's true, I'm not even sure I care. A halfway decent business or gaming headset sounds fine for Zoom or Teams, especially if it's wired to the audio jacks or has a usb connection. It's only the cheapest garbage that has problems. If you are doing audiobook narration or something sure, go for something better, but as long as you spend $50 or so you're fine for virtual meetings.
I will never understand for the life of me why the hell bi-directional high-quality audio over Bluetooth still isn't a thing, even in 2025.
Bluetooth has MORE than enough bandwidth. 320 kbps output gives you damn near lossless quality, and just 128 kbps would be plenty for single-channel microphone audio, and honestly even just 64 kbps would be be fine. You would need at most 500 kbps. Bluetooth is capable of more than that.
Even if there's no bidirectional high quality standard (HFP is bidirectional, but low quality), Bluetooth allows simultaneous logical connections of multiple profiles at the same time. Sure, your computer has an A2DP connection as the source to your headphones as a sink. Why can't a headset also open a second A2DP connection with itself as the source and the computer as the sink?
It just doesn't make sense that a spec that's been around for what, 20 years has failed to keep up. I hate that as a gamer, I can't use the Bluetooth built into my motherboard to use a gaming headset if I want high quality audio. I have to get a headset with a proprietary dongle and then remember to bring it with me to LAN parties.
That would have been perfect time to update headsets. It sounds like A2DP can do backchannel now and there is Qualcomm proposed FastStream. But it isn't implemented widely and probably won't be until standardized.
And I just use the mic attached to my Game Ones which isn’t even a condenser.
The people who try to use their webcam mic or the built in mic are the ones causing most of the problem (yes I'm also looking at you Macbook users).
I always thought it'd be a great idea if in your internal Teams or Zoom instance you had a "send this person a new headset" button to fix the problem.
I hope someone knows, hey I am even down buying those talkshow moderator style mics, like the DPA 6066, that was recommended here. But don't they require a bulk of stuff wearing in your back attached to your pants/belt? For sound I would wear regular noise-cancelling in-ears, here the difference isn't that big, unless you're audiophile like me and many others in this thread. Especially so, if you have above average hearing, the world is optimised for lower-quality sounds :(
Why the focus on just the Laptop/PC? Mobile Phones also feature crappy mics, especially when on loudspeaker. Yeah I noticed it depends very much on the software being used too, but WhatsApp sounds tinny, Instagram sounds crystal sharp, Zoom/Meets sounds tinny.
What if you have to use the screen and still need to listen on your mobile phone? Bummer, the microphone switches to crap-quality on loudspeaker.
Test yourself and record a message with loudspeaker on and off. Especially with background noise it's getting worse, whatever that algorithm is doing, it's tinning your voice to filter the stuff out.
Not quite! You don't really know how you look, because you see yourself before transmission.
Why is there no "play me back but delayed" test meeting option?
Apparently Zoom has this but I'm using Google Meet at the moment... Their answer is "ask someone else". No really.
https://support.google.com/meet/thread/45440945/is-there-a-t...
Sometimes simple works.
I would like to know the effect size but can't find the full paper.
1. I'd be surprised if it didn't have an effect.
2. Your average video call seems much better quality.
So yeah, more expensive is not necessarily better - a wide diaphragm condensor in an untreated lively room is going to sound less authoritative than a cheaper but decent dynamic mic dead close.
An affordable mic that sounds really good for this is the Seinheisser e935. It's not as heinously directional and tight as an SM57 so doesn't ding you when you move, but still has a nice close, warm proximity effect. I use it for zooming and I have much more expensive mics on hand.
A more expensive broadcast favourite with a milder proximity effect is the Electro-Voice RE20. Killer live mic too.
Also - pop shields are good.
BTW, the old wired Apple headphones with the cable remote/mic are a decent cheap solution.
When I know one of my peers made a sizable audio investment, as of then I pretend I can barely hear them.
If I'm sitting at a desk at home anyway, I prefer to plug things in. Power: don't have to think about battery life or power saving modes. Ethernet: don't have to think about wifi. Headset: don't have to think about bluetooth, codecs, or battery. Keyboard: low latency, has followed me through four jobs.
I do use one of those wireless logitech mice, though. The AA battery gives it a nice weight.
A Mic Parts S-25 I built from a kit https://microphone-parts.com/collections/microphone-kits/pro..., Medium Diaphragm Condenser (requires 48V phantom power)
into a JHS Colorbox V2 https://jhspedals.info/products/colour-box-v2 an electric guitar effects pedal emulating a Neve recording console channel strip, can do XLR in/out and pass 48V phantom power to the mic
into a Focusrite Scarlett
with Apple Airpods Pro as in ear monitors
It works for me - I usually audition the mic and the Airpods before unmuting
The colorbox helps increase the gain level so I don't have to be so close to the mic, I usually place it upside-down using a boom mic stand, at around 1 foot away from my mouth at a 45 degree angle from my forward gaze (to avoid plosives and sibilance), Its in frame as a conversation starter but doesn't necessarily have to be.
I find my voice is more intelligible if I use the colorbox to reduce some of the midrange content. It also imparts some compression and harmonic distortion. I watch the Scarlett input indicator to avoid clipping at the digital input
I find myself with less vocal fatigue using this equipment than the Airpods Pro as a mic. Also it just seems a little more exciting to think my voice travels through transistors and capacitors I soldered, through a recreation of a circuit that some of my favorite music was recorded though.
It operates over the 900 megahertz ISM band. I'm able to walk all over my house and property without audio dropping out, and it doesn't suffer from Bluetooth codec compression issues.
https://www.eposaudio.com/en/us/headsets/dect-headsets
I will say they suck for listening to music though (if you're an audiophile)... but I would just switch to good studio monitors for that situation.
I also consider it weird that in a group call somebody could be directly staring at you but you can't tell. Highly unnatural.
It comes down to this: I don't want stuff in my ear all day, and using a pro mic just comes across as "try hard" in most contexts. It's not a benefit.
These days I just use my laptop's mic & speakers like 99% of the people I talk to over Zoom.
if it is an annoyance, chore, or PITA, to listen, even if its something asked for, there had better be compelling content , else it is dumped quickly
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/w...
TL;DR: Audio-Technica ATH-M50xSTS XLR + USB audio interface (if you want to fiddle, get one with onboard compressor, eq, and noise gate).
I've also been routing the steel series arctis nova pro into the audio interface. No steel series software and the interface's compressor and EQ is much better. But the nova pro, despite being the BEST sounding wireless headset mic, still sounds like trash compared to the compressor mic on the wire headset. Seriously, RTINGS has sound clips of every headset they've ever reviewed. Go listen to them. They're tragic. Especially Apples.
A recording doesn't have to be made. It's like having a free audio "monitor."