9 ms·

The ModMic is also excellent, and you can attach it to existing headphones [1]. I use this at home with my prized Sennheisers. It baffles me that some people d

by nvarsj 6y ago

The ModMic is also excellent, and you can attach it to existing headphones [1]. I use this at home with my prized Sennheisers. It baffles me that some people don't seem to care about their audio quality on calls. The most obnoxious are those who use speakers and you get echo on all your talking, and despite telling them, they still never bother to get a decent mic. Another common offender are the Bose QC35s: they have a terrible mic - I wish people would stop using them. All the Apple things have great mics. I always keep an old pair of 3.5mm earpods in my bag as a good, portable laptop mic. [1]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/ModMic-GDL-1420-UNI-Mute-Switch/dp/B07YN25KWN/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=mod+mic&qid=1618498308&sr=8-4 https://www.amazon.co.uk/ModMic-GDL-1420-UNI-Mute-Switch/dp/...

oauea 6y ago
I absolutely love my Bose QC35s. With the modmic that I attached to them. When using the mic built into the Bose QC35s it switches to mono audio, and the mic itself is indeed also terrible. Very unfortunate.
- dreinhardt 6y ago
  Which mod mic do you use? The QC35s have the extra small plug so I thought most mod mics would not fit.
  - oauea 6y ago
    The modmic has their own little sticker that is stuck to the outside of the mic. That's what the modmic attaches to. If you have the wireless one, that's that. If you have the wired one, the 3.5mm jack goes into your PC, not into the QC35s. So it doesn't matter what kind of plug the QC35s have. I actually have both a wired (very old, wire kind of broken because I treated it poorly) and a wireless modmic, and both work fine with my QC35s.
MattGaiser 6y ago
> It baffles me that some people don't seem to care about their audio quality on calls. 1. It is a bunch of extra work and expense for something I probably do not really want to be on. Easy audio communication is bound to induce more audio communication. 2. I have to maintain a bunch of infrastructure for it, manage configuration, and deal with all the wires. It is far from a free and easy improvement. 3. I rarely speak in meetings anyway.
- Drew_ 6y ago
  There are very good USB mics like the Blue Yeti for example. Plug and play with just one cable. You don't have to have a studio recording setup to get your voice to come through nicely.
  - eropple 6y ago
    The Blue Yeti is an okay mic, but is a little pricey for what you get and also buys you into some other stuff you may not want to spend the money on, like a bit of a heavier-weight arm, etc. to be close to one's mouth. It's also a little sensitive for spoken word and while it can sound great in a treated room it's not great for conferences or untrained users due to its habit of picking up a lot of ambient noise through untrained positioning or habits (drumming on a desk, that sort of thing). Most folks I know recommend the Samson Q2U or the Audio Technica ATR2100 instead as easy mics to deal with for untrained users; shameless plug, but I wrote an article for Mux about this not long ago which explains in some depth why one mic may be preferable to another for untrained users: https://mux.com/blog/zoom-like-you-mean-it-1/ https://mux.com/blog/zoom-like-you-mean-it-1/
  - nucleardog 6y ago
    I wouldn't get a Blue Yeti for voice calls. Besides being pricey, it's a condenser mic and a lot more sensitive and prone to picking up other sounds you probably don't want. Something like the Audio-Technica AT2005 also supports USB plug and play, is half to two-thirds the price, and is a dynamic mic so will reject a lot more of the undesirable sound before it even gets into the computer. It's easier to not capture undesirable sounds than it is to try and clean it all up after.
- corysama 6y ago
  > Easy audio communication is bound to induce more audio communication. Alternatively: if you you are going to be hassled with an online meeting, get it over with quickly and with the least stress. It is very slow and stressful to fumble around with “Can you repeat that?” or worse, people not mentioning that they didn’t actually understanding you and then dragging out the meeting with their misunderstanding. “If you have to eat a shit sandwich, take big bites.”
yoz-y 6y ago
The most difficult part is testing how you actually sound for other people. The software can do whatever to the signal coming out of your machine.
thescriptkiddie 6y ago
Has the modmic gotten better? I've had one for years and it has always sounded like garbage.
- nvarsj 6y ago
  It depends a lot on your sound card I guess. Pro streamers use them on twitch as portable options (like Seagull) and they sound great to me. The only real downside to it is the cable is sort of flimsy and the 3.5mm termination is not great quality. That's how my last ModMic perished, although it lasted a few years.
  - Godel_unicode 6y ago
    It also depends on positioning and configuration; having it directly in front of your mouth and/or having the gain too high are common problems I've run into. As an aside, it's been interesting as someone who knows things about audio to realize how much I've unconsciously internalized that most people apparently don't know. Like more gain != more better or what a plosive is.
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  There are a bunch of different versions with different capsules. For example, the Modmic Uni doesn't sound very good, but since it's unidirectional (it's a 6mm cardioid electret I think) it is rather more resistant to ambient noise. The Omni has your usual run-of-the-mill 6mm capsule, these are all very similar in terms of sound and noise performance. The Uni is kinda good enough for pure communication, but you'd really wouldn't want to use it for content production. Also, being electret capsules directly wired up to your soundcard, the soundcard has quite an influence on the quality of the audio (mostly in terms of noise and hiss). Meanwhile the digital versions don't suffer from bad microphone inputs.
- Notorious_BLT 6y ago
  I got their wireless one recently and everyone I regularly use it to talk to immediately noticed the quality and commented on it. Can't speak to the wired ones.
Cd00d 6y ago
> It baffles me that some people don't seem to care about their audio quality on calls. The most obnoxious are those who use speakers and you get echo on all your talking, and despite telling them, they still never bother to get a decent mic. I see comments along these lines here all the time, and I don't get it. I'm on zoom a majority of my day, and have maybe two colleagues that don't just use the laptop mic/speakers and have a headset. I almost never have trouble hearing or understanding or listening to background garbage. In fact, those with headsets will sometimes be worse because they're making a lot of mouth sounds close to the mic. Maybe it's just that Zoom is good at this? TBH, when we used to use Webex on dedicated phones I felt like I couldn't ever hear or understand anything. Maybe that's where this microphone feedback comes from?
- nvarsj 6y ago
  It's probably just related to crappy laptop hardware. Macbook speakers/mics are great and I never hear any feedback from them. When it happens, and you can hear your voice echoing on everything you say, it gets quite annoying.
- brundolf 6y ago
  If they're using external speakers, the only reason you're not hearing echo is because it's being software-cancelled. Different systems are better or worse at this software-cancelling; phones are good, Apple computers are good, otherwise YMMV.
  - KeepFlying 6y ago
    I assume it also depends on if they are using the laptop speakers or some standalone ones. I'm guessing the cancelation tech is tuned for the onboard speakers
    - brundolf 6y ago
      Yeah that would make sense
    - noodlesUK 6y ago
Godel_unicode 6y ago
I have found that many of the people who didn't shower in hot weather are the same people who don't care about their audio quality; I think it requires a certain amount of empathy for other people to realize how jarring and annoying bad audio is for the listener. It's also similar to the anti-mask problem, frankly. Even if you don't care, you should realize that others do and not abuse them for your own convenience.
stcredzero 6y ago
It baffles me that some people don't seem to care about their audio quality on calls. Here's the thing about perception: A lot of it happens without your conscious knowledge. One of the things about using Audacity as one's cheap studio software, is that you have to adjust for recording latency for multitrack. It's really easy to see how a part of perception is unconscious with the delay. Almost no one is going to notice 5ms or below. At 20ms, many musicians are going to have this definite sense that something is off, but they can still hang. In between, it's a spectrum. In order to introspect enough to notice things that are below conscious perception, some people require some training. This is also why audio snake oil works. I use the wireless ModMic myself.
- muro 6y ago
  10ms is 3m, thus e.g. in an orchestra, 20ms latency is normal.
  - stcredzero 6y ago
    Yup. 30 feet or 10 meters is about the limit for comfortable improvisation. Really large orchestras can require musicians to compensate. I had to do this once when my school's band joined up with a National Guard band to form a huge orchestra for an 1812 Overture. (With actual cannon!)
- kthejoker2 6y ago
  > Almost no one is going to notice 5ms or below. At 20ms, many musicians are going to have this definite sense that something is off, but they can still hang. In between, it's a spectrum. Reminded me of this article, easily one of the top 20 I've ever read (Brian Eno, Francis Crick, Italo Calvino, roller coasters, trepanation, time, death, drumming) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilian https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilia... > “I was working with Larry Mullen, Jr., on one of the U2 albums,” Eno told me. “ ‘All That You Don’t Leave Behind,’ or whatever it’s called.” Mullen was playing drums over a recording of the band and a click track—a computer-generated beat that was meant to keep all the overdubbed parts in synch. In this case, however, Mullen thought that the click track was slightly off: it was a fraction of a beat behind the rest of the band. “I said, ‘No, that can’t be so, Larry,’ ” Eno recalled. “ ‘We’ve all worked to that track, so it must be right.’ But he said, ‘Sorry, I just can’t play to it.’ ” > Eno eventually adjusted the click to Mullen’s satisfaction, but he was just humoring him. It was only later, after the drummer had left, that Eno checked the original track again and realized that Mullen was right: the click was off by six milliseconds. “The thing is,” Eno told me, “when we were adjusting it I once had it two milliseconds to the wrong side of the beat, and he said, ‘No, you’ve got to come back a bit.’ Which I think is absolutely staggering.”
Nasrudith 6y ago
You are wondering why people who prioritize something else "don't care about audio quality"? Remember open offices? The likely culprit for them going with noise canceling headphones? Yeah they still have their old gear and are accustomed to it and the form factor. Philosophically it is also why would you go with something big and cumbersome for a feature you seldom use? You don't carry a glass bed scanner in your laptop bag - you take a photo if you really need to get a digital copy of a printing. Plus not all are equally enthused or know how to filter through the crap without a large /in person show room/ that would be either filthy or a pain in the ass to disinfect before a pandemic. Not helping matters are audiophiles being infamously placebo connoisseurs and walking proof that it is easier to fool someone than convince them they were fooled. That market is flooded with bullshit and specious claims so the default assumption for people claiming you need new more expensive audio equipment has been "ignore them, they are gullible idiots who think you need gold cables for digital connections to reduce low level noise for digital signals".
- blablabla123 6y ago
  > You are wondering why people who prioritize something else "don't care about audio quality"? Remember open offices? The likely culprit for them going with noise canceling headphones? Exactly that. I've been working for 5 years in more or less noisy open offices. Some of them so noisy that there were regular arguments between the self-proclaimed quiet ones and the noisy phone callers. I followed this with amusement. So yes, it is quite an exaggeration to now ask for Hifi audio quality during meetings. Apart from that, I think a little noise makes the lockdown in the home office a bit less boring, the majority of people worked on-site before the pandemic.
spockz 6y ago
It baffles me as well. Especially because I do get feedback like wow your voice “carries”, or it is clear, or that it is “calm”. The best comment I received was that it sounded like I was there in the room and that it captured my voice well. Related to the OP my voice also has been called convincing. This is with a beyer dynamic microphone extension for a studio headphone. And I have the gain fixed. Everyone else in our comp keys team sessions has keyboard sound, plops, distortions. But in general it pretty well understandable at the cost of having to spent effort to understand. So maybe software is doing a hell of a job here.
owenversteeg 6y ago
In my experience AirPods have excellent mics for what they are. They're definitely a million times better than the built in mic on the various (high-end) phones and laptops I've used in recent years. I wonder how they compare to a standalone mic or a decent headset mic (or that ModMic you mentioned.)
- esolyt 6y ago
  AirPods have a worse mic than pretty much anything you can get. Macbook Pro's built-in microphone or Apple's $20 wired earbuds both have much better mics than AirPods. I would suggest recording yourself using different microphones and comparing them to see how bad Airpods mic is.
  - wenc 6y ago
    Just did this. My AirPods Pro sounded a lot worse (very soft, muffled and way less resonant) than the pair of analog 3.5mm wired earbuds that came with an older iPhone. I suspect it's because the wired earbuds had a mic near my throat whereas the Airpods' mic were up near my ears. The difference is very noticeable. Looks like I'll be keeping my wired earbuds around for future conference calls.
- httpsterio 6y ago
  Airpods can't compete with a decently priced boom microphone that actually comes close to your mouth. The distance from your mouth to your ear (where the mic resides) is quite long especially considering how little space they have to throw in a capsule into. So, either you'll get a lot of ambient noise, the signal is quiet or Apple will do some algorithmic trickery that tries to approximate some kind of echo cancelation on the audio signal, but compared to a simple dynamic microphone that just has a more favorable position and form factor, it'll always lose.
  - owenversteeg 6y ago
    Hmm. I just measured the distance between my Airpods and the corner of my mouth at 3" or around 7.5cm. Very approximate measurement, but it seems to be not far off of recommendations for where to place headset boom mics (google says 1-3 inches from the mouth.) Also, it's worth noting what the goal is here. The aim is not to capture the most accurate sound period. I've had calls with people who clearly have very expensive setups, but I end up hearing pen clicks, keyboard sounds, breathing, swallowing etc. The Airpods seem to do a great job of making my voice sound good in general. I've gotten compliments on my audio (so it can't be that bad) and the Airpods don't seem to pick up my breathing, typing, etc so I'm happy.
egypturnash 6y ago
> they still never bother to get a decent mic. one more damn thing to get one more damn thing to research one more damn thing to fit into your budget one more damn thing to acquire that you maybe hope to never ever use again after the Year Of Videoconferencing is over and will have cluttering up your life forever after unless you find someone to pass it off to (if you are really passionate about it: cut the gordian knot of all those problems by convincing whoever holds the purse strings that it would make all these interminable meetings much better if everyone had a nice mic, and get the company to buy a bunch and send them out.)
hippira 6y ago
ModMic(tm) is quite expensive.
markogresak 6y ago
> The ModMic is also excellent I have a ModMic 4 and I am disappointed. I used it for voice calls with my Sennheiser Momentum headphones. - Accidentally pulling on the wire will cause it to turn on the magnetic handle and create unpleasant noise for others. - It picks up signal from the phone trying to connect and transmits it to the listeners as buzzing sound. So I had to put my phone far away to avoid that. - The mute switch does not really mute, it’s more like turning the volume to 10%. Learned that the hard/awkward way. - Sound quality is mediocre, to me it always sounded like any generic mid-range headphones+mic combo. If I could test ModMic before buying it, I would pass. I’d rather put the money towards a standalone mic (e.g. yeti) + boom arm. It’s expensive, but the quality is way better. I now use Røde PodMic with Scarlett Solo. It’s whole other price tier, but I do not regret spending that money, which I cannot say for the ModMic.
cortesoft 6y ago
> It baffles me that some people don't seem to care about their audio quality on calls. They might care but have no idea it is bad. You can’t hear yourself on a call.

by nvarsj 6y ago

oauea 6y ago

I absolutely love my Bose QC35s. With the modmic that I attached to them. When using the mic built into the Bose QC35s it switches to mono audio, and the mic itself is indeed also terrible. Very unfortunate.

dreinhardt 6y ago
Which mod mic do you use? The QC35s have the extra small plug so I thought most mod mics would not fit.
- oauea 6y ago
  The modmic has their own little sticker that is stuck to the outside of the mic. That's what the modmic attaches to. If you have the wireless one, that's that. If you have the wired one, the 3.5mm jack goes into your PC, not into the QC35s. So it doesn't matter what kind of plug the QC35s have. I actually have both a wired (very old, wire kind of broken because I treated it poorly) and a wireless modmic, and both work fine with my QC35s.

MattGaiser 6y ago

> It baffles me that some people don't seem to care about their audio quality on calls. 1. It is a bunch of extra work and expense for something I probably do not really want to be on. Easy audio communication is bound to induce more audio communication. 2. I have to maintain a bunch of infrastructure for it, manage configuration, and deal with all the wires. It is far from a free and easy improvement. 3. I rarely speak in meetings anyway.

Drew_ 6y ago
There are very good USB mics like the Blue Yeti for example. Plug and play with just one cable. You don't have to have a studio recording setup to get your voice to come through nicely.
- eropple 6y ago
  The Blue Yeti is an okay mic, but is a little pricey for what you get and also buys you into some other stuff you may not want to spend the money on, like a bit of a heavier-weight arm, etc. to be close to one's mouth. It's also a little sensitive for spoken word and while it can sound great in a treated room it's not great for conferences or untrained users due to its habit of picking up a lot of ambient noise through untrained positioning or habits (drumming on a desk, that sort of thing). Most folks I know recommend the Samson Q2U or the Audio Technica ATR2100 instead as easy mics to deal with for untrained users; shameless plug, but I wrote an article for Mux about this not long ago which explains in some depth why one mic may be preferable to another for untrained users: https://mux.com/blog/zoom-like-you-mean-it-1/ https://mux.com/blog/zoom-like-you-mean-it-1/
- nucleardog 6y ago
  I wouldn't get a Blue Yeti for voice calls. Besides being pricey, it's a condenser mic and a lot more sensitive and prone to picking up other sounds you probably don't want. Something like the Audio-Technica AT2005 also supports USB plug and play, is half to two-thirds the price, and is a dynamic mic so will reject a lot more of the undesirable sound before it even gets into the computer. It's easier to not capture undesirable sounds than it is to try and clean it all up after.
corysama 6y ago
> Easy audio communication is bound to induce more audio communication. Alternatively: if you you are going to be hassled with an online meeting, get it over with quickly and with the least stress. It is very slow and stressful to fumble around with “Can you repeat that?” or worse, people not mentioning that they didn’t actually understanding you and then dragging out the meeting with their misunderstanding. “If you have to eat a shit sandwich, take big bites.”

yoz-y 6y ago

The most difficult part is testing how you actually sound for other people. The software can do whatever to the signal coming out of your machine.

thescriptkiddie 6y ago

Has the modmic gotten better? I've had one for years and it has always sounded like garbage.

nvarsj 6y ago
It depends a lot on your sound card I guess. Pro streamers use them on twitch as portable options (like Seagull) and they sound great to me. The only real downside to it is the cable is sort of flimsy and the 3.5mm termination is not great quality. That's how my last ModMic perished, although it lasted a few years.
- Godel_unicode 6y ago
  It also depends on positioning and configuration; having it directly in front of your mouth and/or having the gain too high are common problems I've run into. As an aside, it's been interesting as someone who knows things about audio to realize how much I've unconsciously internalized that most people apparently don't know. Like more gain != more better or what a plosive is.
formerly_proven 6y ago
There are a bunch of different versions with different capsules. For example, the Modmic Uni doesn't sound very good, but since it's unidirectional (it's a 6mm cardioid electret I think) it is rather more resistant to ambient noise. The Omni has your usual run-of-the-mill 6mm capsule, these are all very similar in terms of sound and noise performance. The Uni is kinda good enough for pure communication, but you'd really wouldn't want to use it for content production. Also, being electret capsules directly wired up to your soundcard, the soundcard has quite an influence on the quality of the audio (mostly in terms of noise and hiss). Meanwhile the digital versions don't suffer from bad microphone inputs.
Notorious_BLT 6y ago
I got their wireless one recently and everyone I regularly use it to talk to immediately noticed the quality and commented on it. Can't speak to the wired ones.

Cd00d 6y ago

> It baffles me that some people don't seem to care about their audio quality on calls. The most obnoxious are those who use speakers and you get echo on all your talking, and despite telling them, they still never bother to get a decent mic. I see comments along these lines here all the time, and I don't get it. I'm on zoom a majority of my day, and have maybe two colleagues that don't just use the laptop mic/speakers and have a headset. I almost never have trouble hearing or understanding or listening to background garbage. In fact, those with headsets will sometimes be worse because they're making a lot of mouth sounds close to the mic. Maybe it's just that Zoom is good at this? TBH, when we used to use Webex on dedicated phones I felt like I couldn't ever hear or understand anything. Maybe that's where this microphone feedback comes from?

nvarsj 6y ago
It's probably just related to crappy laptop hardware. Macbook speakers/mics are great and I never hear any feedback from them. When it happens, and you can hear your voice echoing on everything you say, it gets quite annoying.
brundolf 6y ago
If they're using external speakers, the only reason you're not hearing echo is because it's being software-cancelled. Different systems are better or worse at this software-cancelling; phones are good, Apple computers are good, otherwise YMMV.
- KeepFlying 6y ago
  I assume it also depends on if they are using the laptop speakers or some standalone ones. I'm guessing the cancelation tech is tuned for the onboard speakers
  - brundolf 6y ago
    Yeah that would make sense
  - noodlesUK 6y ago

Godel_unicode 6y ago

I have found that many of the people who didn't shower in hot weather are the same people who don't care about their audio quality; I think it requires a certain amount of empathy for other people to realize how jarring and annoying bad audio is for the listener. It's also similar to the anti-mask problem, frankly. Even if you don't care, you should realize that others do and not abuse them for your own convenience.

stcredzero 6y ago

It baffles me that some people don't seem to care about their audio quality on calls. Here's the thing about perception: A lot of it happens without your conscious knowledge. One of the things about using Audacity as one's cheap studio software, is that you have to adjust for recording latency for multitrack. It's really easy to see how a part of perception is unconscious with the delay. Almost no one is going to notice 5ms or below. At 20ms, many musicians are going to have this definite sense that something is off, but they can still hang. In between, it's a spectrum. In order to introspect enough to notice things that are below conscious perception, some people require some training. This is also why audio snake oil works. I use the wireless ModMic myself.

muro 6y ago
10ms is 3m, thus e.g. in an orchestra, 20ms latency is normal.
- stcredzero 6y ago
  Yup. 30 feet or 10 meters is about the limit for comfortable improvisation. Really large orchestras can require musicians to compensate. I had to do this once when my school's band joined up with a National Guard band to form a huge orchestra for an 1812 Overture. (With actual cannon!)
kthejoker2 6y ago
> Almost no one is going to notice 5ms or below. At 20ms, many musicians are going to have this definite sense that something is off, but they can still hang. In between, it's a spectrum. Reminded me of this article, easily one of the top 20 I've ever read (Brian Eno, Francis Crick, Italo Calvino, roller coasters, trepanation, time, death, drumming) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilian https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilia... > “I was working with Larry Mullen, Jr., on one of the U2 albums,” Eno told me. “ ‘All That You Don’t Leave Behind,’ or whatever it’s called.” Mullen was playing drums over a recording of the band and a click track—a computer-generated beat that was meant to keep all the overdubbed parts in synch. In this case, however, Mullen thought that the click track was slightly off: it was a fraction of a beat behind the rest of the band. “I said, ‘No, that can’t be so, Larry,’ ” Eno recalled. “ ‘We’ve all worked to that track, so it must be right.’ But he said, ‘Sorry, I just can’t play to it.’ ” > Eno eventually adjusted the click to Mullen’s satisfaction, but he was just humoring him. It was only later, after the drummer had left, that Eno checked the original track again and realized that Mullen was right: the click was off by six milliseconds. “The thing is,” Eno told me, “when we were adjusting it I once had it two milliseconds to the wrong side of the beat, and he said, ‘No, you’ve got to come back a bit.’ Which I think is absolutely staggering.”

Nasrudith 6y ago

You are wondering why people who prioritize something else "don't care about audio quality"? Remember open offices? The likely culprit for them going with noise canceling headphones? Yeah they still have their old gear and are accustomed to it and the form factor. Philosophically it is also why would you go with something big and cumbersome for a feature you seldom use? You don't carry a glass bed scanner in your laptop bag - you take a photo if you really need to get a digital copy of a printing. Plus not all are equally enthused or know how to filter through the crap without a large /in person show room/ that would be either filthy or a pain in the ass to disinfect before a pandemic. Not helping matters are audiophiles being infamously placebo connoisseurs and walking proof that it is easier to fool someone than convince them they were fooled. That market is flooded with bullshit and specious claims so the default assumption for people claiming you need new more expensive audio equipment has been "ignore them, they are gullible idiots who think you need gold cables for digital connections to reduce low level noise for digital signals".

blablabla123 6y ago
> You are wondering why people who prioritize something else "don't care about audio quality"? Remember open offices? The likely culprit for them going with noise canceling headphones? Exactly that. I've been working for 5 years in more or less noisy open offices. Some of them so noisy that there were regular arguments between the self-proclaimed quiet ones and the noisy phone callers. I followed this with amusement. So yes, it is quite an exaggeration to now ask for Hifi audio quality during meetings. Apart from that, I think a little noise makes the lockdown in the home office a bit less boring, the majority of people worked on-site before the pandemic.

spockz 6y ago

It baffles me as well. Especially because I do get feedback like wow your voice “carries”, or it is clear, or that it is “calm”. The best comment I received was that it sounded like I was there in the room and that it captured my voice well. Related to the OP my voice also has been called convincing. This is with a beyer dynamic microphone extension for a studio headphone. And I have the gain fixed. Everyone else in our comp keys team sessions has keyboard sound, plops, distortions. But in general it pretty well understandable at the cost of having to spent effort to understand. So maybe software is doing a hell of a job here.

owenversteeg 6y ago

In my experience AirPods have excellent mics for what they are. They're definitely a million times better than the built in mic on the various (high-end) phones and laptops I've used in recent years. I wonder how they compare to a standalone mic or a decent headset mic (or that ModMic you mentioned.)

esolyt 6y ago
AirPods have a worse mic than pretty much anything you can get. Macbook Pro's built-in microphone or Apple's $20 wired earbuds both have much better mics than AirPods. I would suggest recording yourself using different microphones and comparing them to see how bad Airpods mic is.
- wenc 6y ago
  Just did this. My AirPods Pro sounded a lot worse (very soft, muffled and way less resonant) than the pair of analog 3.5mm wired earbuds that came with an older iPhone. I suspect it's because the wired earbuds had a mic near my throat whereas the Airpods' mic were up near my ears. The difference is very noticeable. Looks like I'll be keeping my wired earbuds around for future conference calls.
httpsterio 6y ago
Airpods can't compete with a decently priced boom microphone that actually comes close to your mouth. The distance from your mouth to your ear (where the mic resides) is quite long especially considering how little space they have to throw in a capsule into. So, either you'll get a lot of ambient noise, the signal is quiet or Apple will do some algorithmic trickery that tries to approximate some kind of echo cancelation on the audio signal, but compared to a simple dynamic microphone that just has a more favorable position and form factor, it'll always lose.
- owenversteeg 6y ago
  Hmm. I just measured the distance between my Airpods and the corner of my mouth at 3" or around 7.5cm. Very approximate measurement, but it seems to be not far off of recommendations for where to place headset boom mics (google says 1-3 inches from the mouth.) Also, it's worth noting what the goal is here. The aim is not to capture the most accurate sound period. I've had calls with people who clearly have very expensive setups, but I end up hearing pen clicks, keyboard sounds, breathing, swallowing etc. The Airpods seem to do a great job of making my voice sound good in general. I've gotten compliments on my audio (so it can't be that bad) and the Airpods don't seem to pick up my breathing, typing, etc so I'm happy.

egypturnash 6y ago

> they still never bother to get a decent mic. one more damn thing to get one more damn thing to research one more damn thing to fit into your budget one more damn thing to acquire that you maybe hope to never ever use again after the Year Of Videoconferencing is over and will have cluttering up your life forever after unless you find someone to pass it off to (if you are really passionate about it: cut the gordian knot of all those problems by convincing whoever holds the purse strings that it would make all these interminable meetings much better if everyone had a nice mic, and get the company to buy a bunch and send them out.)

hippira 6y ago

ModMic(tm) is quite expensive.

markogresak 6y ago

> The ModMic is also excellent I have a ModMic 4 and I am disappointed. I used it for voice calls with my Sennheiser Momentum headphones. - Accidentally pulling on the wire will cause it to turn on the magnetic handle and create unpleasant noise for others. - It picks up signal from the phone trying to connect and transmits it to the listeners as buzzing sound. So I had to put my phone far away to avoid that. - The mute switch does not really mute, it’s more like turning the volume to 10%. Learned that the hard/awkward way. - Sound quality is mediocre, to me it always sounded like any generic mid-range headphones+mic combo. If I could test ModMic before buying it, I would pass. I’d rather put the money towards a standalone mic (e.g. yeti) + boom arm. It’s expensive, but the quality is way better. I now use Røde PodMic with Scarlett Solo. It’s whole other price tier, but I do not regret spending that money, which I cannot say for the ModMic.

cortesoft 6y ago

> It baffles me that some people don't seem to care about their audio quality on calls. They might care but have no idea it is bad. You can’t hear yourself on a call.