4 ms·

I’m surprised this didn’t mention the elephant in the room: the audio quality is terrible. I simply can’t hear half of what is said, even at full volume in a q

by ken 6y ago

I’m surprised this didn’t mention the elephant in the room: the audio quality is terrible. I simply can’t hear half of what is said, even at full volume in a quiet room. Either I ask for repetition all the time (and walk over whatever the next person said), or I assume it from context and let it go. Even when I can pick up all the sounds, it’s so different from hearing voice in person that I have to concentrate just to parse the audio into meaning. It’s exhausting. Cell phone calls are still pretty bad, too. Low bandwidth digital audio compression is just wretched.

zdragnar 6y ago
Could it be an issue with microphones or speaker quality? My fully remote team has used zoom for all of our meetings, and unless someone is calling in from a cell phone in a busy area, I don't recall a time when I have had difficulty understanding someone. If anything, the fact that everyone has their own microphone makes it better than in person meetings, because you never have to struggle with that one person who doesn't talk loud enough for the entire table to hear (which is sometimes me, because I have a very soft voice and struggle to speak loudly in big meetings).
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  Not OP. Some people do have really terrible hardware. It would be good IMO if the software had an input quality indication. Or a test mode that does a loop test, play on speaker at end A, listen on mic A, play back mic A on speaker B, listen on mic B, analyse profile and reverse the test - "you may experience poor sound as B's microphone has a bad frequency profile" or something. The other thing that would be nice is if Win10 hadn't hidden the microphone level/gain controls.
- ken 6y ago
  It’s possible, but then why is it $1000 smartphones are struggling with this, and $5 landline phones from 1993 did just fine? Did Apple skimp on audio hardware that bad? That’s a little hard to believe.
  - noirbot 6y ago
    My guess would be that most people calling in to a call on Zoom from their phone are leaving it on speakerphone and not holding it up to their ear/mouth like you would with an old land-line phone. Opening up an omni-directional mic that has to pick up someone from 1-2 feet away from their mouth is a lot different than an old-school phone that you pick up and hold an inch away from your lips. You're not paying Apple $1000 for a microphone on a stick when you buy an iPhone, you're buying a computer that has a tiny microphone that works well enough for most normal phone calls to your doctor or whichever. If you care about audio quality as a foremost feature, you do what business people have been doing for years and buy a wireless headset/in-ear with a directional mic that's built for comfort and tuned to pick up audio in the exact distance range of your ear to your mouth.
  - zdragnar 6y ago
    Aside from the sibling comment's point, the majority of your $1000 smartphone's cost is large, high resolution touchscreen, ever-higher quality camera, and ever thinner case and battery to power them. As for Apple in particular, it is worth pointing out they have a hard time getting laptop keyboards right, when keyboards in the general sense have been working fine for decades. They make tradeoffs for other values (thinness) and the product suffers as a result.
qppo 6y ago
The only thing really terrible is their (lack of) echo cancellation. Otherwise I'm about 90% sure it's just off the shelf OPUS with next to no DSP on top. It's not that bad on its own. What is terrible is audio hardware on laptops. MacBooks are alright, but just $50 on a headset will go a long ways to solving your problems. Consumers haven't given a shit about audio fidelity for decades honestly, it's just showing today when you are listening to unprocessed audio streams that haven't been optimized for your laptop or phone's fundamentally inferior transducers. This is a solved problem, for what it's worth. The major audio manufacturers sell products for these use cases. It's not the software at this point, it's actually decent. It's the input and output devices. Thank god for gamers buying these things and driving economies of scale.
- justincormack 6y ago
  Macs have hardware echo cancellation, and most software appears to enable it.
- ken 6y ago
  So the solution is "convince all of my (unemployed) friends to spend $50 on something which has more value to me than to them"? Assuming that does solve it, I'd say a solution is known, but I wouldn't call it "solved". That's like a "nobody needs DropBox" type of "solved problem".
  - qppo 6y ago
    Well they have value in hearing others and being heard, I'd assume. All my friends have their own mics because we couldn't understand eachother otherwise, and we don't have problems with fidelity. My coworkers are a different story, because consumers rarely listen to integrated microphones before they purchase a device (bluetooth earbuds are absolutely terrible about this, fwiw). Who's at fault, the company for cheaping out, or the consumer for not caring enough to find out if they company cheaped out? The technical problem is solved. The economics problem of getting people to value the solution and marketing problem of educating about it is still open. Regardless, this isn't a problem to be solved by software. It's a consumer electronics problem.
jpalomaki 6y ago
The problem is most likely caused by the other party not using a headset. Even the cheap ones result in much better sound quality than the laptop microphone. Another factor can be lack of bandwidth. Audio quality in Zoom itself is superb according to my experience. Webex is applying some heavy compression. Teams is closer to Zoom, but not as good. And I would say the root cause is people not knowing how bad they sound. Others don't complain, because they don't want to spend time debugging one participants audio setup. It would help if all the conferencing tools would provide easy to use tools for testing your setup (record message, play it back). Maybe one could even offer (as an option) a forced audio check before you can join the meeting.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  You'd think / hope that nowadays builtin microphones would be better; I mean place them next to the webcam, add some wadding / filtering in front (like the round disk things in professional settings), have two of them, and do some clever AI things to filter out anything that isn't speech. And enforce push-to-talk with a clear visual indication of who wants to speak (ATM in Zoom, Skype it's too subtle).
- tuyiown 6y ago
  > not using a headset I thought that for a long time. And then, a colleague and I have a MBP 16, and poof, looks like descent quality speaker and microphone on a properly integrated sound stack does wonders even on standard software.
  - schnable 6y ago
    Our team is all on 15" MBPs, sound quality is quite good with built in mics and only marginally better with a headset. The worst is when someone is phoned in, the quality is poor and they have more delay.
mihaaly 6y ago
You are absolutely right! When considerable effort is put into deciphering what you (think) you hear beyond following the topic itself that is exhausting! When I use good quality connection I can pay attention more to the meaning rather than the words spoken.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
I have issues with some peers who have thick accents who normally in the office I have zero problems understanding. It does get tiring. It's no ones fault other than the audio tossing away information though. I hate having to ask people to repeat themselves and saying "the audio is kind of crappy today".

by ken 6y ago

zdragnar 6y ago

Could it be an issue with microphones or speaker quality? My fully remote team has used zoom for all of our meetings, and unless someone is calling in from a cell phone in a busy area, I don't recall a time when I have had difficulty understanding someone. If anything, the fact that everyone has their own microphone makes it better than in person meetings, because you never have to struggle with that one person who doesn't talk loud enough for the entire table to hear (which is sometimes me, because I have a very soft voice and struggle to speak loudly in big meetings).

pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Not OP. Some people do have really terrible hardware. It would be good IMO if the software had an input quality indication. Or a test mode that does a loop test, play on speaker at end A, listen on mic A, play back mic A on speaker B, listen on mic B, analyse profile and reverse the test - "you may experience poor sound as B's microphone has a bad frequency profile" or something. The other thing that would be nice is if Win10 hadn't hidden the microphone level/gain controls.
ken 6y ago
It’s possible, but then why is it $1000 smartphones are struggling with this, and $5 landline phones from 1993 did just fine? Did Apple skimp on audio hardware that bad? That’s a little hard to believe.
- noirbot 6y ago
  My guess would be that most people calling in to a call on Zoom from their phone are leaving it on speakerphone and not holding it up to their ear/mouth like you would with an old land-line phone. Opening up an omni-directional mic that has to pick up someone from 1-2 feet away from their mouth is a lot different than an old-school phone that you pick up and hold an inch away from your lips. You're not paying Apple $1000 for a microphone on a stick when you buy an iPhone, you're buying a computer that has a tiny microphone that works well enough for most normal phone calls to your doctor or whichever. If you care about audio quality as a foremost feature, you do what business people have been doing for years and buy a wireless headset/in-ear with a directional mic that's built for comfort and tuned to pick up audio in the exact distance range of your ear to your mouth.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  Aside from the sibling comment's point, the majority of your $1000 smartphone's cost is large, high resolution touchscreen, ever-higher quality camera, and ever thinner case and battery to power them. As for Apple in particular, it is worth pointing out they have a hard time getting laptop keyboards right, when keyboards in the general sense have been working fine for decades. They make tradeoffs for other values (thinness) and the product suffers as a result.

qppo 6y ago

The only thing really terrible is their (lack of) echo cancellation. Otherwise I'm about 90% sure it's just off the shelf OPUS with next to no DSP on top. It's not that bad on its own. What is terrible is audio hardware on laptops. MacBooks are alright, but just $50 on a headset will go a long ways to solving your problems. Consumers haven't given a shit about audio fidelity for decades honestly, it's just showing today when you are listening to unprocessed audio streams that haven't been optimized for your laptop or phone's fundamentally inferior transducers. This is a solved problem, for what it's worth. The major audio manufacturers sell products for these use cases. It's not the software at this point, it's actually decent. It's the input and output devices. Thank god for gamers buying these things and driving economies of scale.

justincormack 6y ago
Macs have hardware echo cancellation, and most software appears to enable it.
ken 6y ago
So the solution is "convince all of my (unemployed) friends to spend $50 on something which has more value to me than to them"? Assuming that does solve it, I'd say a solution is known, but I wouldn't call it "solved". That's like a "nobody needs DropBox" type of "solved problem".
- qppo 6y ago
  Well they have value in hearing others and being heard, I'd assume. All my friends have their own mics because we couldn't understand eachother otherwise, and we don't have problems with fidelity. My coworkers are a different story, because consumers rarely listen to integrated microphones before they purchase a device (bluetooth earbuds are absolutely terrible about this, fwiw). Who's at fault, the company for cheaping out, or the consumer for not caring enough to find out if they company cheaped out? The technical problem is solved. The economics problem of getting people to value the solution and marketing problem of educating about it is still open. Regardless, this isn't a problem to be solved by software. It's a consumer electronics problem.

jpalomaki 6y ago

The problem is most likely caused by the other party not using a headset. Even the cheap ones result in much better sound quality than the laptop microphone. Another factor can be lack of bandwidth. Audio quality in Zoom itself is superb according to my experience. Webex is applying some heavy compression. Teams is closer to Zoom, but not as good. And I would say the root cause is people not knowing how bad they sound. Others don't complain, because they don't want to spend time debugging one participants audio setup. It would help if all the conferencing tools would provide easy to use tools for testing your setup (record message, play it back). Maybe one could even offer (as an option) a forced audio check before you can join the meeting.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
You'd think / hope that nowadays builtin microphones would be better; I mean place them next to the webcam, add some wadding / filtering in front (like the round disk things in professional settings), have two of them, and do some clever AI things to filter out anything that isn't speech. And enforce push-to-talk with a clear visual indication of who wants to speak (ATM in Zoom, Skype it's too subtle).
tuyiown 6y ago
> not using a headset I thought that for a long time. And then, a colleague and I have a MBP 16, and poof, looks like descent quality speaker and microphone on a properly integrated sound stack does wonders even on standard software.
- schnable 6y ago
  Our team is all on 15" MBPs, sound quality is quite good with built in mics and only marginally better with a headset. The worst is when someone is phoned in, the quality is poor and they have more delay.

mihaaly 6y ago

You are absolutely right! When considerable effort is put into deciphering what you (think) you hear beyond following the topic itself that is exhausting! When I use good quality connection I can pay attention more to the meaning rather than the words spoken.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

I have issues with some peers who have thick accents who normally in the office I have zero problems understanding. It does get tiring. It's no ones fault other than the audio tossing away information though. I hate having to ask people to repeat themselves and saying "the audio is kind of crappy today".