Let me summarize my take on the 'don't mute' advice in this article:
* Is the call 1:1 or extremely small? If so, it's down to the preferences of the people in the call. Otherwise, for larger calls:
* Are you in a quiet environment?
* That was a trick question. You are not in a quiet environment. You think you are, because your human brain is good at filtering out background noise. Your microphone is not. You are not being forced to actually listen to what your microphone hears. The rest of us are. Mute your fucking microphone!
Some environments are actually quiet, and even silent if you sample from a boom microphone that will pick up barely any ambient sounds. Not everyone is an idiot. Forcing people to use headsets is, in my experience, more bulletproof than forcing people to mute. Our company is considering making it a policy (just like "turn on your cameras").
Ahh, but the key problem which leads me to swear and make generalizations is this: Not everyone is an idiot; but idiots don't know they're idiots. (Also, to be clear, I don't think that people who unknowingly transmit background noise on calls are idiots. Clueless, sure. Inconsiderate, sure, if someone's pointed it out and they're still doing it.)
Headsets with boom microphones (specifically) capture virtually no ambient noise because the gain on the microphone is extremely low (the relative volume of your voice picked up 1 inch from your mouth is much higher than that of anything else at the same location).
I can vacuum my house while on my bluetooth headset and people won't hear it on the other end.
Along with this, I've taken to making the video chat window very small and putting it at the top edge of my screen underneath my webcam. Reasonably good eye contact and lots of screen space for notes or whatever.
Wired internet and wired headphones make such a huge difference, it's almost unreal. My best video conversations are always with others are with those who do the same thing. There are just fewer gaps in the conversation, fewer "can you hear me now" moments when headphones unpair, and fewer "Mr. Roboto" moments.
I took this to a bit of an extreme, using a Sennheiser broadcast headset into a USB sound card. I also added a hardware mute button inline, with a big clicky button with which you can easily tell the mute status (and mute/unmute) regardless of which window is up front. It also lets you pipe your own voice back into your ear, which can be a bit more comfortable listening wise. It really takes the guesswork out of quality and makes it much easier to use, especially when you might have to use 4 different conference applications in a day, and can't quickly recall where the mute button is in a particular one.
I remember doing live A/V broadcast and we had a similar setup for comms for the whole team - a hardware push to talk switch was amazing. Might have to invest in something similar for my home workstation too.
Yes, exactly that. I was in live production for some years, that's where I grew to like the simplicity / bullet proof nature of that style. It would be nice if a manufacturer would release a USB headset that allowed monitoring of ones own voice, and a hardware talk switch.
I use a Sennheiser HME 26-II. I like it because the quality is very good (headphones and microphone), it's comfortable to wear for long periods of time, and the second ear cup can be flipped back off the ear. Sennheiser makes a number of models designed for day-long wear, the models made for air traffic controllers are in my opinion also good in this regard.
I had a lot of issues with bluetooth headphones as well, but at least Logitech's USB dongle headsets never caused any issues for me. I'm using a H800. The audio device is always available as long as the dongle is plugged in, even if you turn off the headset, so you never have the issue of your audio device not being available and your software switching to a different device. You only need to turn the headset on and it works.
Jabra has a similar USB dongle (Jabra Link), but I haven't used it yet.
I find wireless headphones to be amazingly liberating - especially if they have their own mute button. Being able to pace around in the middle of a meeting, or even nip to the loo and not miss the conversation (we've been here 70min and I've been muted for 65 of them) means I actually pay far more attention to what's going on.
A lot of headphones have long cords, which can give you 10+ feet of movement options. Bluetooth may give you freedom, but you sacrifice latency and reliability.
The higher end Jabra's are wired _and_ wireless (USB cable that can be detached) so you can get the audio quality or the freedom depending on what is more appropriate at a given time.
Keep in mind: Bluetooth audio _sucks_ for calls, it's way lower bitrate than normal music-mode bluetooth audio.
I've been using a wireless corsair headset on the PC with it's own USB dongle. Latency, quality, range and comfort are all good enough for my needs. I've used long headphone cables (as the other reply suggested) but I usually end up getting twisted in them late at night or send drinks flying. I said for years that wireless was an unnecessary silliness, but I wouldn't dream of going back now.
Bluetooth headsets are impressively awful still. Even when they're really good they still fail in surreal and unexpected ways (ignoring all the problems I have pairing them to my laptop). Listening to an audiobook on the beach would regularly have problems talking from the phone in my pocket to the headset if I was laying down on my back or leaning on a wall. I've also recently moved near a railway line and whilst I don't get disturbed by the trains, 8 seconds before they go past I get a blip in my headphones which is screamingly annoying. There are still a stunning amount of upsides for me personally; I'm not sure I'd go back to cheap in-ear wired headphones readily at all.
What pro productions use for wireless microphones and audio is actually pretty decent with low or almost no latency. They present as a wired microphone to whatever sound source you plug them into.
Indeed. All the latency (well most of it) adds up. If you're running wifi on the same spectrum as audio, that adds latency and jitter too.
In an ideal world, voice would be over (real) PTSN which has tremendously low latency compared to anything modern. Cost and convenience make that unlikely though.
Not everyone has a stable desk they can run wired ethernet to, but if you can it makes things better.
I was thinking about getting "better" bluetooth headphones than my current cheap one ear one mic headset Sennheiser headset but between your comment and the article
> (~$100) Buy open-back headphones, which let you hear your own voice normally and are extremely comfortable.
For me, getting a USB speakerphone made a huge difference. It's so much more comfortable than wearing a headset all day, even a wireless one.
After a lot of research (I would recommend this blind test as a start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBRkKAelaKQ) I decided for the Calisto P7200. Its microphone quality seems to be comparable to a headset, and it will automatically turn off when there are no human voices, so nobody will hear you typing.
It's comfortable but it's not full duplex as opposed to a proper headset. Keep in mind everyone else's ability to speak to you on a call is impaired by using a speakerphone.
I have tried enough conference call speakerphones that claimed to be full duplex to know that it's a safe assumption that the claim is 100% false.
I haven't tried this specific one but from my point of view the odds of a microphone picking up your voice clearly from 2ft away, while happily filtering out a very loud sound being emitted 1cm away at the same time, are quite low. Much lower than the odds of a marketing drone getting away with lying on a product brochure.
I'm not an audio expert, but I doubt the SNR is there for the noise cancelling to be effective when you have to substract a 10db echo to recover a 1db voice.
On the other hand, Katie from the Amazon review seems knowledgeable and she has past reviews of other speakerphones so it might be worth a shot :) Still, I'll believe it when I hear it!
Interesting. I have one of the "known bad" speakerphones at home, I will test it out later and post my results. It could be that the echo cancellation software has been the culprit this whole time.
> you have to substract a 10db echo to recover a 1db voice
You would think so, but subtracting the (speaker-generated, i.e., known-signal!) sound from 1cm away is trivial. The hard part is subtracting the echoes off your walls, laptop, desk decorations, etc. etc. etc.
That's not 10db, but it's still on par with your voice!
You are not wrong at a high level -- speakerphones are terrible -- but it's not because the speaker is right next to the mic!
Seconding this. I like the Arctis line by SteelSeries.
The only exception I can think of is if your environment is exceptionally quiet -- It's probably not -- or if your mic/computer have better audio filtering then most.
It just works. I haven't experimented a lot with the built-in microphone because I have been in enough meetings that have been ruined by people using the built-in microphone. But I never heard any complaints about echos, and when I record myself using the speakerphone the audio quality is fine. I have also experiemented with background noise such as typing, and as I long I don't speak, I can't hear myself typing.
The mic and speakers on the laptop are designed for a single listener/speaker sitting directly in front of the machine.
A USB speakerphone is designed for multiple speakers and a wider area in which they could be positioned.
You also get some advantages from isolating the mic/speaker from the laptop chassis, noise control and such. Same reasoning as using an external DAC/Amp for headphones rather than the onboard interfaces.
I have a Jabra and I love it, but in a crowded house with meetings and remote learning going on, it's not usually an option. A USB headset with directional microphone works well for me.
Does anyone have tips on persuading the other participants in regular video calls to do even the bare minimum of wearing headphones? My own setup is pretty good, but I’m stuck in a hell of people using built in laptop speakers and microphones, or wireless ear buds, despite everyone in the company being issued a decent headset.
I grew so frustrated with this that I'm making a website just to have a link that I can give to people instead of going on a rant.
People just don't realize how unacceptable speakers are. Tools should just have a prompt that says "hey, you are ruining everyone else's life by using speakers".
Is using speakers still troublesome if I'm using a good mic, with good rejection, close to my mouth? I find wearing headphones pretty tiresome so I avoid them. I never got a complaint about how I sound after getting the mic.
Most people don't complain because your software does echo cancellation, not because your microphone actually rejects the audio from your speakers properly.
This makes your whole system half-duplex (if someone else talks, they can't hear you). Have you tried using Zoom's "original audio" mode?
Here's an excerpt from an article I'm writing:
----
Computers, sadly, are way dumber than you. When the microphone on your computer captures the sound coming out of your computer's own speakers, it can't really tell that it's not you talking. It just hears a sound. The obvious consequence of this confusion is an echo - you can hear yourself. Every single time you've heard your own voice repeated back to you on a conference call, it was caused by someone else on the call using speakers.
The sound engineers at Zoom, Google, Skype, Jitsi are very clever though. They noticed that they could fix that problem by writing software to do echo cancelation - clever algorithms that detect an echo and then remove it from the audio signal. This software is the reason why most times when you hear an echo on a conference call in 2020, it usually goes away on its own after a few seconds (Note: this doesn't prevent people on the call from thinking that whatever they did to try to fix it actually worked). Echo cancellation is one of many forms of what's called Digital Sound Processing, which we'll talk more about in a minute.
Shure sm58, even being in front of it the sound is very attenuated just by being a feet too far from it :)
yes I'm aware that some software does echo cancellation, as you say it doesn't need to be full mute while you speak, it "just" needs to cancel the signal that would cause feedback...
I started using the dedicated mic because I got complaints that my audio was pretty quiet, due to the fact (I thought) that I 1. keep my laptop farther than you usually would, and 2. sometimes I turn to my second monitor to refer to some info; mic seems to have fixed the issue but I hope echo cancelling does the rest of the job without me needing headphones :D
Well, live-performance grade cardioid microphone on a stand in front of your mouth is probably the one thing that will work acceptably well with speakers. Glad I asked :) But it's really an outlier setup you have there.
But lack of an echo is not proof that the setup works, because the problem with echo cancellation is that it is too aggressive, not too subtle. There is no echo when you use the shitty ambient microphone that is 2cm away from your laptops builtin speakers.
But in removing that echo, the software is also removing your voice from the call signal, or other people's voices from your speakers' signal. The symptoms are more subtle, but you and others will miss parts of the call when you speak over each other (or in rapid succession). This creates a lot of "huh? can you hear me?" or weird interruption timings.
Try having someone on the other side of a Zoom call that wears a proper headset, then both of you can turn on "original audio" mode on Zoom. You can actually speak over each other like you would be able to do in person, and back and forth is much more natural, especially if there is more than 2 people having a discussion.
PS: Keep in mind I do 10-12 hours of calls a day, and a lot of them are sales and/or management which requires a lot of active careful listening. My standards can be slightly unreasonable for a more normal use case (say, if you are a developer and do two meetings a day where people take turns to talk).
I hate this. The other day I was on a multi-person Zoom, and one woman's stupid iPhone or email kept going off, making that shrill DING sound, and every time it happened, the camera focus went to her, even if she wasn't talking, because Zoom thought she was -- the DING was that loud.
I don't see an issue with wireless ear buds, and on an online call only one person should be speaking anyway. Zoom rarely fail to filter the echo, unless you but the mic so that it creates the high pitch sound.
Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on developing an optimal immersive video call setup just for yourself, we need to get effective designers to work on video chat interfaces to solve the basic problems that still plague us.
* Why can't I quickly and immediately flag my intent to speak? Once you introduce lag into a conversation (and _every_ video chat conversation includes lag), you can't get away with "let's just be unmuted and hope for the best".
* Why can't everyone in a chat see participants in the same order? How can we truly feel like we are speaking in a virtual space together when we do not share the same view? This one is the most frustrating since it has the greatest impact compared to how easy it is to implement. It is hard to overstate the benefit of having a consistent shared experience.
* Why can't I tell at a glance whether I'm muted or not? Why do I have to find the mute button every time? Everyone has a keyboard, why are we avoiding it like the plague?
* Choosing the correct input/output sources is one of the most common source of issues. And yet, we continue to hide it behind confusing settings. I've only noticed Discord get the memo and let you adjust sources straight from the main screen.
>* Why do people have to appear in a random order?
The service we use shows people in order of appearance, except you yourself (who is always prepended to the list).
>* Why can't I tell whether people are present/engaged when their video is off?
Why should you be able to tell? Quite often, meetings are a waste of time, and even in the ones which aren't, only a small amount of information will be useful to each person. It's easy to read HN and pay attention for your name or the name of the team you're part of while on a call. Besides that, what counts as 'present/engaged'? I think everyone would be present (in case something be asked of them). Does 'engaged' mean they need to sit there and nod at everything even if it's irrelevant to them?
> * Why can I only see 5 people if someone is sharing their screen?
This reminds me of my two huge pet peeves:
* Why am I forced to see people? If I'm deep into helping someone else out, I want to make their screen as big as possible, I'm not looking at their face at all.
* Zoom spends some effort making my lips and voice sync up. Why don't you make my clicks sync up as well when I'm sharing?
All these problems come from these video call services trying to serve a million masters. If you're in a meeting it might be nice to have a big red X while you're muted, but it's distracting in an online class when you're always muted. If you're in a class or doing a demonstration you might always want to see the screen, but if you're doing a presentation you may want to see both the face and the screen. How many people should you show while someone is sharing their screen? In my online class I would say 0, and in my meetings I would say everybody.
Zoom shows a huge text overlay if you're speaking while on Mute.
It also has the space bar to temp unmute, basically a tap to speak mode.
I think the UI route for Zoom is wrong though as most users are just lazy and can't be bothered with even minimal effort. So, it should play a loud-ass sound when you speak on mute.
Or just electrocute, to solve humanities problems long term.
Yes exactly! and maybe why can't it show me when my audio is breaking up on the receivers computer, it could be their system or mine, either way i'd like an indicator of dropped audio.
> Why can't I tell at a glance whether I'm muted or not? Why do I have to find the mute button every time? Everyone has a keyboard, why are we avoiding it like the plague?
Would be nice if they just drew a giant red X when you’re muted.
My gripe is multiple screens while presenting. Give me the choice to show whichever screen my mouse is on.
My experience with "hand raising" interfaces has been that it takes clicks, when it should be a first-class operation as easy as speaking itself. Indicators for speaking, too, are insufficient. I think every video chat app has that, but what they don't have is "I am _about_ to speak", like "I would like to jump in now"; An interface equivalent to that thing people do with their body language to signal they're about to speak (they raise their head, open their mouth, perhaps lean in a bit). Not as extreme as "raising my hand".
I wrote an article with some overlap with Ben's article about this back in March[1], so I've been experimenting with trying to get better audio and video outside of Zoom and other apps.
They tend to optimize for the lowest common denominator. Despite having a nice headworn mic and earbuds, great webcam and good lighting setup, Zoom and other apps tend to optimize for using as little bandwidth as possible so my audio doesn't sound nearly as good as it could.
Ben makes some good points that I didn't mention or consider myself:
- I wasn't aware of Zoom's "use original audio" feature so I'll need to give that a try.
- Dedicated monitor is great; having a presentation monitor allows you to keep your shared screen clean but still have notes and other stuff available.
- Open back headphones to hear your own voice: good idea if you have a dedicated space to yourself, but not if you share the space with anyone else
The biggest problem with this is other people: you won't get any benefits from others if they have a bad setup. So it requires everyone to have a reasonable setup (even just a headset makes a huge difference).
>Dedicated monitor is great; having a presentation monitor allows you to keep your shared screen clean but still have notes and other stuff available
I have a dual monitor setup but what I find works even better for notes and other shared docs a lot of the time is working on a laptop alongside my desktop computer. Admittedly I'm in a dedicated office so I just need to turn a bit to type on my laptop.
One of the advantages is that I have a very clicky mechanical keyboard on my desktop so typing while on a call is noisy if I'm also speaking so can't be muted.
Since I don't see anyone mentioning this yet, I want to emphasize the recommendation for open-back headphones. This is by a large margin my favorite piece of hardware for making video calls tolerable. I never deal with echo, noise cancellation, or shitty speaker output. But at the same time I can hear myself perfectly fine when I speak and I don't get the claustrophobic feeling of having the external world shut out.
Did you get separate headphones and mic as Ben suggested, or an open-back headset with an integrated boom mic? I think I'd rather go the latter route if I can get a headset with a good mic; the Sennheiser GameOne looks like a good choice.
For a while I was still using my laptop's mic. Now I do have a separate microphone as well.
I don't use a headset mic. My experience is that those rarely sound good and tend to end up with even more breathing and mouth noises and stuff than even a computer's built in mic.
I have a Blue Yeti that work got me. I've asked other people on video chats and they say the mic is a big improvement over my laptop's. I think that particular mic is a little bulky and ostentatious but it seems to get the job done.
The ambient sound rejection of boom microphones (the ones on headsets) is superior to anything else just by virtue of how close they are to your mouth.
You have to do a modicum of adjustment to make sure you are not breathing on the actual microphone, or chewing on stuff while you are not muted. I shift to my ambient microphone if I'm eating on a call.
Unless you are in a studio-grade environment (including not typing on your computer) or doing some serious voice recording, I have found boom microphones to be the better tradeoff for actually talking to others.
Articles like these (I've read a few), while well-intentioned, seem to contribute to self righteous ideas about video calls... As someone who has invested in a video conferencing setup, I don't really think it's fair to expect any friend or colleague to do _any_ effort to make themselves sound good.
People often draw the wrong conclusions from posts like this. I've worked with people who've taken offense if anyone's video conferencing gear wasn't up to their bar, and it felt like a meta-topic that was never worth the time.
I’m a bit of the opposite. I find it slightly offensive that people are not investing in their video conference abilities during times like these.
The most notable has been a healthcare provider I’ve been working with. For a multitude of reasons not related to COVID we’ve been relying on telehealth. The sessions are predominately about the conversation and it’s downright frustrating that the provider can’t even be bothered to use the earbuds with mic that come with an iPhone. Our audio is constantly stepping over each other. I’m also looking up the provider’s shadowed nose the entire time too.
The answer is somewhere in the middle. I don’t expect the provider to spend nearly a grand as this persons blog post advocates. However, some super basic training about audio, camera positioning, and lighting would make a world of difference.
There are also now tools like Krisp which use ML to remove background noise. https://krisp.ai/ I'm not fully sold on it yet (added some fuzz for me), but it seems promising.
I'm most interested in tips on tools or devices that allow you get higher quality audio calls while taking walks.
If you have an nvidia graphics card you can use their RTXVoice app. It says RTX on the tin but you can use it with older cards (I'm not sure how far down they go but I can say it works with 10xx series cards).
Nvidia used to restrict installs to RTX cards but people worked out how to remove the restriction. Recent RTXVoice versions removed this restriction so now you don't need to modify ini files to install it.
There's also the open-source RNNoise -- I know Mumble added support for it recently, and it's _amazing_ -- if we were allowed to use it for work, I'd prefer it for voice-only stuff over Zoom.
No, please, do mute. I don't want to hear a baby crying in the background while the SO tries to calm them down, nor do I want to hear someone doing the dishes, or the police siren that seems to have stopped in a congested area. We have work to do. Please, let's get it done and stop the meeting.
Also, thank you Google for enabling people to mute other participants who do not realize how loud their environment is.
This article seems to come from a place where people live in big, spacious places (possibly rural North America? I could see Canada). The reality for me is that most of my coworkers work from a 1- or 2-bedroom studios crammed with kids and/or their significant others.
You seem to have skipped the entire context of the article and that point, which is having good acoustics, including “get away from other people” and “get a better microphone”. If you don’t have both of those, then the advice is manifestly inapplicable.
Highly personal opinion, there's no need to mute in those scenarios either (at least in low participant count videos). It makes the speaker able to adapt to things that are impacting their listener's attention. Even if they're muted, a child crying is going to take their attention, and its better that the speaker is aware of it.
A simple noise canceling microphone takes care of distant, and thus unimportant sounds.
EDIT: Please take note of the "in low participant count videos" caveat above before lambasting me about how this doesn't work in 40 person meetings. I'm talking about meetings with 3-4 people.
Hearing a child crying doesn't just make me aware that someone is distracted, it also distracts me and makes it much harder to communicate. I would much rather have one person on the call be distracted while on mute than have the entire call be distracted. Also depending on what video conferencing software you use, background noise like crying continually interrupts the speaker and makes it really hard to hear.
Nothing annoys me more than people having background noise and not muting themselves, no one should be pushing crying babies and barking dogs to my headphones without a reason it completely ruins the call for me. If I really need to know if they are distracted, I can just look at their video.
I think a big difference is the assumption of the kind of meeting you are in; for most of the business meetings I consider valuable, if there is someone distracted by a transient issue the meeting should stop and wait, and if it doesn't they are just going to have to stop everything themselves to request things be repeated for them. If you are in a meeting and it doesn't matter if you are distracted you aren't really participating, are you? ;P So like, definitely mute the call as you are just an observer.
This simply doesn’t work in the long run, and/or at scale. For me someone who doesn’t mute while they’re not talking is a dead giveaway they haven’t been doing remote work for very long.
It’s simply rude to broadcast your noise to the entire group of people, let alone dozens of people doing so at the same time. If your child is crying, it’s fine, I understand how things are, and of course I’ll understand you’re distracted. However, I’m not fine with your child distracting all 20 people on the call.
My opinion: no, do mute, as just another adhd kiddo, man those police sirens will bring me down in no time. I get what you're saying though, and I recognize there's value in folks getting to know a little bit of each other's situation -- but I think we can just let each other know of our situations verbally when an event rises to the level of a certain importance, and minimize the unimportant sounds as much as possible.
The TL;DR has as point 1: don't work in a place where babies crying or dish-washing or police sirens are an issue, and then as part of point 4: therefore, don't mute.
If you have a baby crying or police sirens, then yes, for the sake of everybody's sanity, mute yourself. For sure.
> don't work in a place where babies crying or dish-washing or police sirens are an issue
I.e. don't work in the middle of a global pandemic.
A headset mic will pick up your loud typing, sniffling, clearing your throat, and whatever. Even if you are working out of a sound-proofed office, and in a group call, mute your mic when not speaking.
> A headset mic will pick up your loud typing, ... and whatever.
Not necessarily. A cheap one will, since it acts as an omnidirectional microphone. A good one, however, will have a hypercardoid microphone and an externally directed second omnidirectional microphone hooked up to a noise canceling circuit that renders external sounds effectively inaudible.
I can type on my keyboard with my Antlion mic on, and it's not audible to others (even though it's fairly loud to my ears). And yes, I tested this with a local recording first.
That said, I agree that coughing, clearing your throat, and such are definitely mute moments.
I had a headset mic that worked fine as long as I plugged it directly in to my laptop.
Then one day I plugged it in to the port on my laptop's dock, instead of the plug on the laptop itself. In the dock's port it was suddenly so sensitive that it was picking up the slightest sound out of the headphones (and immediately feeding back)! And a conversation going on in the neighboring conference room, that I couldn't even hear on my own! Unless you really focused on something it was just insane loud background noise. But, it was fine once I turned the mic volume down to like 2%. But also, my words could be made out even with the insane sensitivity--I guess that's pretty impressive dynamic range.
So:
1. If you're picking up things on the mic you think you shouldn't, try turning down the mic's volume, it might be that your voice stays loud enough, but everything else drops off.
2. If you're getting background noise now, it might not be your new setting, it might be your computer hardware. If you're using different computing hardware maybe you need to fuss with the volume even though it's the same headset as before.
Not necessarily. I can vacuum my house with my Bluetooth headset and you can't hear it on the other end. Your issue is with people that use ambient microphones, more than with people that don't mute.
A poor-quality headset mic and sub-standard audio software might. People dialing in on a phone should always be muted at all times, even when they have something to say, because phone quality with Zoom isn't good. But on my laptop, with my headphones, I can even chew and no sound is transmitted at all. I can see this on my real-time level monitor, and have confirmed it with others. I don't eat during meetings, but I could.
Typing and sniffing sounds like people using a built-in laptop mic as a speakerphone, not a headset.
> A poor-quality headset mic and sub-standard audio software might.
In a conference with 10 people, 7 will be on Windows PC's with on-board RealTek, where the only mic control in the control panel is a basic gain and a mute checkbox, or else with some cheap USB headsets, 2 will be on the road with their phones, and 1 will be on a Mac.
You will never get a conference with everyone having True Scotsman hardware and drivers, and so the general rule has to be for everyone to mute.
In conferences with 10 people at my company, it's 10 MacBooks, and more than half are using either AirPods or AirPods Pro. At least if they're all engineers. I don't usually get into meetings with accountants.
Look, I'm all in favor of people muting by default, especially in larger meetings. But when I chat with my team, 2-5 people usually, the only person who mutes himself usually is the one Linux user.
I take your point—these are weird times. But one, hopefully they won’t last forever and remote work will be here to stay. Two, I’ve maybe never had a workplace that wasn’t full of distractions, including police sirens and dishwashing (but let’s toss in random political conversations, free lunch food, ping pong, doors slamming, etc etc). I’m on team Spolsky where everyone gets an office, but I’m also aware it’ll never, ever happen.
i'm not sure why you're getting downvoted because this is, as far as i can tell, the central point of the whole piece: the most important thing you can do for making a properly immersive, high-quality video call is to isolate yourself away from background noise. once you've done that, then go ahead start geeking out over the quality of your mic, your camera quality, your backlighting, and all the other details.
but if you can't isolate yourself from background noise, then there's no point in getting fancy equipment for the rest of the stuff. just put yourself on mute and use your laptop's built in mic and webcam, because nothing you try will fix the background noise.
I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted either, but I guess many people find it hard to believe that not everybody has the same experiences they do?
Like, I don't have a baby crying in my house because I don't have a baby. Or pets. If you do, stay muted. Where I live my environment is very, very quiet. Which the article says is step 1. If you can't do step 1, then yeah, this article isn't for you.
I think people were mostly reacting to the suggestion that you don't need to mute in a quiet environment.
Which I sort of agree with in a small call where people are having back and forth conversation with each other. If I'm in a 1:1 I don't mute.
But it's still a good idea on larger calls or even a smaller one where you're just going to be listening to a presentation. In general, there's not a lot of cost associated with going on mute.
I was on a call with an education technologist, and I noticed she had a very good trick for keeping the flow of communication going while expressing her agreement. Instead of saying "uh-huh" at regular intervals (which can interrupt the flow because of audio lag), she would just give thumbs-up to show her agreement. I've started doing this as well and have found that it precludes a lot of the "oh no — oh, I was just going to say yes I understand" comments that often happen in video calls.
1. Zoom may be great for quality, it's terrible for human rights and is beyond deplorable. Please don't use it. Please communicate this to everyone who suggests using it.
2. This hits the nail on the head with the duplex audio problem and the only video service that gets it right is.. actually Discord who started as audio only originally.
> Zoom, the videoconferencing technology provider, has acknowledged it shut down the account of a group of prominent Chinese activists based in the U.S. after they held an event on the platform honoring the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
There's a number of reports available under the keywords "zoom china meeting", but it boils down to:
1) Zoom has been reported to send video call encryption keys to China.
2) Zoom has sent participant lists of particular video calls to China authorities.
3) Zoom now segregates Chinese from the rest of the world, so that the keys and participant lists can be disclosed to Chinese censors, without impacting the rest of the world.
The sad fact that more and more large corporations are willingly helping regimes with surveillance and repression is only overshadowed by the fact that even people who claim to care still use, support or outright defend these companies.
Your bottom line doesn't rise above basic human rights. If your profit forecast requires you to make concessions on rights to a political party that is currently putting an ethnic and religious minority in detention camps, then your profit forecast is wrong.
There is no reason sufficient to justify such behavior.
edit:
As to Google in the US, there is no legal framework requiring them to obey any administration and in fact significant protection if they would like to make fun of or openly attack it. There is no comparison here that isn't in utter bad faith.
One thing that people don't mention is just having a beefy computer. Programs like Zoom and Teams are a combination of horribly engineered and replete with processing-intensive features like virtual backgrounds and noise/echo removal. Using a desktop PC instead of a closed overheating laptop goes a long way.
Gave up and use phone exclusively for video calls. I do not need my coworkers’ face on 27” screen to see what he thinks about what i say. Also works extremely well will airpods and video quality is great. Spent exactly $30 to get generic holder for the phone and that’s it
> If there was a $2000 device that eliminated the need for this post to exist, it would be an automatic purchase for my employer and probably every other distributed company. But there isn’t, so here we are.
Anyone used a Facebook Portal? How is it? Could it be hacked for this?
We got a team account for https://krisp.ai. It does a fantastic job at filtering out background noise. Especially helpful for our city based team members who have lots of road noise normally.
Some software or process (depends on the OS) to tune your camera matters also. A few adjustments to color, contrast, white balance, etc, can make you look much better.
By default, it's not always easy to figure this out.
I have the Logitech C920 webcam the post mentions. The white balance truly is all over the place, especially if you don't have great lightning setup.
I ended up adjusting the image manually with v4l2-ctl (see for example http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man1/v4l2-ctl.1.h...) I also pointed my warm white light desk lamp towards the wall behind my desk and bounce a bit of light back on my face off the wall.
I also have a C920: it's fairly infamous for the "Smurf effect", where it tends to make everything look unnaturally blue. Setting the "white_balance_temperature" setting manually improves this situation substantially! Depending on your OS, you might have to first set a "white_balance_temperature_auto" to "off" and then set a "white_balance_temperature" in Kelvin. [In OpenBSD, we recently added this ability, but conflated the two controls into one. YMMV will vary by OS!]
I'm glad to see others pointing this out. Compared to the build-in webcam on my MacBook Pro, the C920 is much sharper, but I look like a ghost most of the time. And Logitech's software leaves a lot to be desired; at one point, it was bundled in with their gaming software package and asks for lots of extra permissions to control my computer that I don't need for the webcam.
If there is a better thirty-party program out there for macOS, I would love that.
I can adjust the white balance with my Elgato key light and that seems to work pretty well.
The Logitech C920 is IMO a nice compromise. It's as high quality as you need for most purposes and it doesn't take up the desk real estate of a dedicated camera. It's also easier to have your eyes closer to the slides you're presenting or the video of the person you're speaking with.
For my Mac, I find that EpocCam on my iPod Touch (and iPhone) is very good as a webcam, especially in low light.
For mounting it, this looks good:
SHAWE Phone Holder Bed Gooseneck Mount
This advice is all targeted at the technical challenges which, in the language of NSB, are all accidental factors. The essential challenge of video calls is bandwidth; you just don't get the same depth of rich, non-verbal communication. I find I need to turn up my antennae to 11 to really "hear" what people are trying to communicate, which is incredibly exhausting.
Nothing wrong with the advice here, but done perfectly it will take your meetings from a 3/10 to a 6. I was hoping for tips on improving communication.
The tip is to approach the online persona of every person as a different person than their offline persona. People act differently online than they do offline. People expect to send and receive as much information and in the same way online as they offline. This is wrong.
Figure out the little facial gestures, the verbal indications and such that allow you to get some of the richness back. Obviously, you won't get to as good as offline, but if everyone puts in the effort, you start to understand the limits of what can be sent and received online to each person.
It's surprising to what extent the technical factors are detrimental to the communication. Even if I assume that you are a smart person that has spent a lot of time on this, I want to question whether you have done a call with a good wired headset, on a good wired broadband internet connection, and using Zoom's "original audio" setting.
In person is better of course but a low latency, high quality connection goes a LONG way and it's rare enough that most people have never experienced it.
Open back headphones are a luxury but not necessary: call centers have long ago taught us about the $5 one-eared headphone with a regular headphone price for one ear and a padded base clipped just above the other ear. All audio/video calls are mono (and horribly encoded and filtered at that), you’re missing nothing by listening with only one ear and gaining nothing by paying for quality headphone drivers that will go wasted on the barely over 8 kHz sampling tinny audio that’s coming in over the pipe.
While they are a cost effective choice in the hellscape that is call centers, I wouldn't recommend anyone engage in one-ear listening for any significant length of time.
Sound heard in two ears is perceived by your brain as louder than that heard in only one ear. A listener using only one ear must raise the volume, and the harm of that over the long term (and even individual event exposures) is well studied.
Anecdotally I have several people in my family that used to work in radio, spend extended amounts of time using monitors in only one ear, and now have advancing or profound hearing loss in that ear.
Also, where are you pulling your notion of 8Khz capped audio quality from? Skype has historically had some issues with selection of the crappiest audio codec and sample rate that resulted in pushing many calls down to the lowest bar of 8Khz, but info I can find for Teams suggests a sample rate of 16Khz and bit rate of ~50kbps. For Zoom it looks to be 32Kbps ~50kbps. By no means approaching the capabilities of a decent audio output setup, but better than you reference.
Take a photograph and print it on a nice piece of photo paper.
Hand the photo to a friend along with a sharpie. Ask them to write a short message to you on the photo’s surface.
Scan the result, then write some code to produce an image of the message in black on a white background. Well done, it’s probably very close!
Now repeat the exercise using a blank sheet of white paper instead of a printed photo. This is your call with headphones, vs a call on speakerphone!
(Bonus points if you chose a photo of some sharpie writing on a white surface for the first part of this exercise. This is you on speakerphone in a public space filled with people using speakerphones to also make calls.)
* Is the call 1:1 or extremely small? If so, it's down to the preferences of the people in the call. Otherwise, for larger calls:
* Are you in a quiet environment? * That was a trick question. You are not in a quiet environment. You think you are, because your human brain is good at filtering out background noise. Your microphone is not. You are not being forced to actually listen to what your microphone hears. The rest of us are. Mute your fucking microphone!