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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

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).

gryfft 3y ago
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.
tayo42 3y ago
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.
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
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.
- whiddershins 3y ago
  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.
  - eropple 3y ago
    AirPods do sound quite acceptable if you're on a phone, I think. There's something weird about how they interact with macOS.
aaronscott 3y ago
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.
- kcb 3y ago
  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.
  - Calamitous 3y ago
    My company issued everyone headsets, and the audio is night-and-day difference, but maaaaaaan I hate wearing a headset.
    - deprecative 3y ago
      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.
empyrrhicist 3y ago
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.
- eropple 3y ago
  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.

gryfft 3y ago

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.

tayo42 3y ago

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.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago

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.

whiddershins 3y ago
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.
- eropple 3y ago
  AirPods do sound quite acceptable if you're on a phone, I think. There's something weird about how they interact with macOS.

aaronscott 3y ago

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.

kcb 3y ago
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.
- Calamitous 3y ago
  My company issued everyone headsets, and the audio is night-and-day difference, but maaaaaaan I hate wearing a headset.
  - deprecative 3y ago
    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.

empyrrhicist 3y ago

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.

eropple 3y ago
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.