4 ms·

The built-in microphone is actually excellent, I often use it even when I have my AirPods Pro in because the sound quality is so much better If you've got head

The built-in microphone is actually excellent, I often use it even when I have my AirPods Pro in because the sound quality is so much better If you've got headphones with a wraparound microphone on its own arm then it could be better, but everyday headphones are limited by the position of the microphone

eptcyka 2y ago
I hope you do not take notes or brush dust off the macbook whilst in a video call.
- gabrielhidasy 2y ago
  Why, are they not able to reject these types of noise? My X1 doesn't even register typing in a video call
  - pantalaimon 2y ago
    Even on Linux?
  - jrockway 2y ago
    Software noise cancellation is actually kind of amazing. During the pandemic when I was doing 8 hours of video calls a day, I paid for Krisp and it eliminated any background noise pretty much perfectly. One time a very loud fire truck was slowly driving by. It was so loud I couldn't even hear myself think and just stopped talking. People were confused because that noise was eliminated but I was just talking very weirdly ;) In the interim, they raised the price and added a ton of bloat so I don't use it anymore. (The bloat killed it, not the price. And the popup that's like "you're so stupid that you can't even figure out how to enable Krisp Speaker, you idiot". I'm well aware of how to enable it, but I have chosen not to, as I do not want to heavily process the audio that I'm listening to. Only emitting. "Don't ask again" would have probably made them an extra $110 at least.)
    - nucleardog 2y ago
      Pretty much the same boat. Early 2020 I was spending so much time on calls headphones were just tiring. So it started as "get a microphone + speaker setup that doesn't echo" and just kind of spiraled into a half decade of incremental improvements. Don't know that I've had anything as loud as a fire truck, but more than a few times I've had a 75lb dog a few feet away from me barking like mad, whining at me, playing by throwing a cow femur up in the air and letting it crash down on the vinyl floor, etc and apologized about the noise only to have people look at me funny and tell me they didn't hear anything but that explains why I seemed like I was having trouble speaking. I think the only time I had anyone say anything about anything was when I accidentally had an air conditioner blowing directly on my microphone. They couldn't hear it, but my voice was coming through a little less crisp than usual as the noise cancellation was trying to remove the constant, high volume white noise. Don't know what OS you're on, but on Linux I can definitely recommend Easy Effects (https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.wwmm.easyeffects https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.wwmm.easyeffects). Been using RNNoise + Speex along with some other filtering for quite a while now to great effect. One thing I found worked _really_ well if you're already using an external microphone of some sort--using the webcam microphone as part of a noise gate. On top of the filtering and existing gating, my audio only opens if my webcam _also_ picks up sound of sufficient volume. Lets me keep the microphone in front of my face fairly sensitive while still entirely eliminating echo and most off-axis sounds.
  - eptcyka 2y ago
    I constantly hear a harsh swoosh when people wipe stuff or drag their palms across their macbooks.
entropicdrifter 2y ago
Plenty of good headsets do beamforming with their microphones as well, just depends on what you're running. Macbook mics are well above average, though, so I agree in most cases they'll be better unless you're picky about your headset mic quality.
- seanp2k2 2y ago
  This is also a great example counterpoint for the folks who constantly complain about Apple hardware being "overpriced". Most laptop mfgs are happy to just solder on whatever tiny $0.50 compatible MEMS mic and put a little toothpick-sized hole in the case and call it good enough, or add two and rely on whatever generic beam forming that isn't adapted to their specific mic choice, placement, case acoustics, etc the Realtek ALC262 or whatever gives them, and call it a day. Apple puts a ton of R&D into making things work well. As another example: Macbooks have been, for 15+ years now, the only laptops that I can trust to actually sleep and conserve battery when I close the lid and slip into a backpack for a few-hr flight. Windows and Linux on laptops seem to have about a 70% chance of either not sleeping, not waking up right (esp with hybrid graphics), or trying to do forced Windows updates and killing the battery, then waking back up to 20+ minutes of waiting for updates to resume / finish with no meaningful progress indicator or way to cancel / delay. Not everything they do is perfect, and I'm not some huge Apple fanboy, but they do offer a significantly better experience IMO and feel "worth" the premium. It's not as if modern gaming laptops are any cheaper than MBPs, but they certainly feel much jankier, with software and UX to match. As an example, the IEC plug on the power supply of my Asus Zephyrus Duo wiggles enough that it disconnects even with different IEC cables. I've had to wrap some electrical tape around the plug body to get it to be less flaky. Asus Armoury Crate is a terrible buggy and bloated piece of software that runs about a dozen background processes to deliver a "gamer" UI to...control fans, RGB lights, and usually fail to provide updates. They also have utilities like https://www.asus.com/us/content/screenxpert3/ https://www.asus.com/us/content/screenxpert3/ and "ROG ScreenPad Optimizer" that are largely buggy garbage, but sometimes required to get their proprietary hardware to work properly. Does Apple gouge users for extra RAM and SSD space? Absolutely, but you're paying for the R&D as much as the actual hardware. I wish they'd just price that into the base models and make upgrades cheaper, but their pricing strategy seems to be lowering the base entry point to something more appealing with "it barely works" levels of spec, while making increasingly ridiculous margins on higher specs -- an additional $4,600 to go from 1TB -> 16TB on the Mac Studio is pretty bold considering consumer QTY=1 pricing on a fast M.2 SSD is around $600 for 8TB, and I'm sure their BOM costs are around the same for 16TB worth of silicon in huge quantities.
ElijahLynn 2y ago
Yeah, no matter how good the microphone actually is on a headset, it uses an ancient codec so until we get Bluetooth 5.3 everywhere with lc3 codex then we won't actually have good mic input from headphones and headsets. I predict that this is all going to change this year and next year. But the full stack has to support it from headphones to Bluetooth chips to OS.
- kenferry 2y ago
  Are AirPods limited to the Bluetooth spec though? I think they extend it.
  - whiddershins 2y ago
    i don't know the details but airpods pro sound noticeably terrible and bluetooth-y. It's almost shocking.
  - brundolf 2y ago
    They extend it in some ways, but I'm not sure if they do in this way. They do sound kind of terrible, but I always assumed it was due to the microphones being way back by your ears. I'm not sure though
- radlad 2y ago
  I think the bigger issue might be the microphone placement. Humans tend to prefer microphones that are closer to microphones which are further away (this is one reason headsets w/ a boom arm usually sound better than a built-in microphone.) Having the microphone behind you / to the side (as in the case of an AirPod) is not great either. Of course, audio processing can fix a lot of this.
- MarcelOlsz 2y ago
  I cannot wait to not take an audio quality hit while the mic is on on the airpods.
  - therein 2y ago
miki123211 2y ago
Everyday headphones are limited by the fact that people often use Bluetooth, and Bluetooth audio is just terrible tech that hasn't improved by much in the last 10 years, and still can't do more than 16kHZ when doing both input and output at the same time. I think this isn't a problem if you're using Apple headphones with Apple devices, but anything else falls back to crappy BT quality, usually with some kind of terrible ANC to boot. FOr me, crappy audio setups and apps trying to do too much audio processing are the primary reason of "Zoom fatigue". I've done a lot of calls over apps that transmit raw, high-quality audio with no processing whatsoever, and the experience is just so much better.
- blep-arsh 2y ago
  Apple-Apple Bluetooth speech codec is a variation of AAC, I believe. AAC-LD if I remember correctly. But still, having microphones in one's ears is suboptimal. There's a lot of processing required even though the codec is no longer completely awful. On an unrelated note, I tried doing calls with a stereo mic setup but participants were actually uncomfortable with the ASMR-like effect of the audio.

eptcyka 2y ago

I hope you do not take notes or brush dust off the macbook whilst in a video call.

gabrielhidasy 2y ago
Why, are they not able to reject these types of noise? My X1 doesn't even register typing in a video call
- pantalaimon 2y ago
  Even on Linux?
- jrockway 2y ago
  Software noise cancellation is actually kind of amazing. During the pandemic when I was doing 8 hours of video calls a day, I paid for Krisp and it eliminated any background noise pretty much perfectly. One time a very loud fire truck was slowly driving by. It was so loud I couldn't even hear myself think and just stopped talking. People were confused because that noise was eliminated but I was just talking very weirdly ;) In the interim, they raised the price and added a ton of bloat so I don't use it anymore. (The bloat killed it, not the price. And the popup that's like "you're so stupid that you can't even figure out how to enable Krisp Speaker, you idiot". I'm well aware of how to enable it, but I have chosen not to, as I do not want to heavily process the audio that I'm listening to. Only emitting. "Don't ask again" would have probably made them an extra $110 at least.)
  - nucleardog 2y ago
    Pretty much the same boat. Early 2020 I was spending so much time on calls headphones were just tiring. So it started as "get a microphone + speaker setup that doesn't echo" and just kind of spiraled into a half decade of incremental improvements. Don't know that I've had anything as loud as a fire truck, but more than a few times I've had a 75lb dog a few feet away from me barking like mad, whining at me, playing by throwing a cow femur up in the air and letting it crash down on the vinyl floor, etc and apologized about the noise only to have people look at me funny and tell me they didn't hear anything but that explains why I seemed like I was having trouble speaking. I think the only time I had anyone say anything about anything was when I accidentally had an air conditioner blowing directly on my microphone. They couldn't hear it, but my voice was coming through a little less crisp than usual as the noise cancellation was trying to remove the constant, high volume white noise. Don't know what OS you're on, but on Linux I can definitely recommend Easy Effects (https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.wwmm.easyeffects https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.wwmm.easyeffects). Been using RNNoise + Speex along with some other filtering for quite a while now to great effect. One thing I found worked _really_ well if you're already using an external microphone of some sort--using the webcam microphone as part of a noise gate. On top of the filtering and existing gating, my audio only opens if my webcam _also_ picks up sound of sufficient volume. Lets me keep the microphone in front of my face fairly sensitive while still entirely eliminating echo and most off-axis sounds.
- eptcyka 2y ago
  I constantly hear a harsh swoosh when people wipe stuff or drag their palms across their macbooks.

entropicdrifter 2y ago

Plenty of good headsets do beamforming with their microphones as well, just depends on what you're running. Macbook mics are well above average, though, so I agree in most cases they'll be better unless you're picky about your headset mic quality.

seanp2k2 2y ago
This is also a great example counterpoint for the folks who constantly complain about Apple hardware being "overpriced". Most laptop mfgs are happy to just solder on whatever tiny $0.50 compatible MEMS mic and put a little toothpick-sized hole in the case and call it good enough, or add two and rely on whatever generic beam forming that isn't adapted to their specific mic choice, placement, case acoustics, etc the Realtek ALC262 or whatever gives them, and call it a day. Apple puts a ton of R&D into making things work well. As another example: Macbooks have been, for 15+ years now, the only laptops that I can trust to actually sleep and conserve battery when I close the lid and slip into a backpack for a few-hr flight. Windows and Linux on laptops seem to have about a 70% chance of either not sleeping, not waking up right (esp with hybrid graphics), or trying to do forced Windows updates and killing the battery, then waking back up to 20+ minutes of waiting for updates to resume / finish with no meaningful progress indicator or way to cancel / delay. Not everything they do is perfect, and I'm not some huge Apple fanboy, but they do offer a significantly better experience IMO and feel "worth" the premium. It's not as if modern gaming laptops are any cheaper than MBPs, but they certainly feel much jankier, with software and UX to match. As an example, the IEC plug on the power supply of my Asus Zephyrus Duo wiggles enough that it disconnects even with different IEC cables. I've had to wrap some electrical tape around the plug body to get it to be less flaky. Asus Armoury Crate is a terrible buggy and bloated piece of software that runs about a dozen background processes to deliver a "gamer" UI to...control fans, RGB lights, and usually fail to provide updates. They also have utilities like https://www.asus.com/us/content/screenxpert3/ https://www.asus.com/us/content/screenxpert3/ and "ROG ScreenPad Optimizer" that are largely buggy garbage, but sometimes required to get their proprietary hardware to work properly. Does Apple gouge users for extra RAM and SSD space? Absolutely, but you're paying for the R&D as much as the actual hardware. I wish they'd just price that into the base models and make upgrades cheaper, but their pricing strategy seems to be lowering the base entry point to something more appealing with "it barely works" levels of spec, while making increasingly ridiculous margins on higher specs -- an additional $4,600 to go from 1TB -> 16TB on the Mac Studio is pretty bold considering consumer QTY=1 pricing on a fast M.2 SSD is around $600 for 8TB, and I'm sure their BOM costs are around the same for 16TB worth of silicon in huge quantities.

ElijahLynn 2y ago

Yeah, no matter how good the microphone actually is on a headset, it uses an ancient codec so until we get Bluetooth 5.3 everywhere with lc3 codex then we won't actually have good mic input from headphones and headsets. I predict that this is all going to change this year and next year. But the full stack has to support it from headphones to Bluetooth chips to OS.

kenferry 2y ago
Are AirPods limited to the Bluetooth spec though? I think they extend it.
- whiddershins 2y ago
  i don't know the details but airpods pro sound noticeably terrible and bluetooth-y. It's almost shocking.
- brundolf 2y ago
  They extend it in some ways, but I'm not sure if they do in this way. They do sound kind of terrible, but I always assumed it was due to the microphones being way back by your ears. I'm not sure though
radlad 2y ago
I think the bigger issue might be the microphone placement. Humans tend to prefer microphones that are closer to microphones which are further away (this is one reason headsets w/ a boom arm usually sound better than a built-in microphone.) Having the microphone behind you / to the side (as in the case of an AirPod) is not great either. Of course, audio processing can fix a lot of this.
MarcelOlsz 2y ago
I cannot wait to not take an audio quality hit while the mic is on on the airpods.
- therein 2y ago

miki123211 2y ago

Everyday headphones are limited by the fact that people often use Bluetooth, and Bluetooth audio is just terrible tech that hasn't improved by much in the last 10 years, and still can't do more than 16kHZ when doing both input and output at the same time. I think this isn't a problem if you're using Apple headphones with Apple devices, but anything else falls back to crappy BT quality, usually with some kind of terrible ANC to boot. FOr me, crappy audio setups and apps trying to do too much audio processing are the primary reason of "Zoom fatigue". I've done a lot of calls over apps that transmit raw, high-quality audio with no processing whatsoever, and the experience is just so much better.

blep-arsh 2y ago
Apple-Apple Bluetooth speech codec is a variation of AAC, I believe. AAC-LD if I remember correctly. But still, having microphones in one's ears is suboptimal. There's a lot of processing required even though the codec is no longer completely awful. On an unrelated note, I tried doing calls with a stereo mic setup but participants were actually uncomfortable with the ASMR-like effect of the audio.