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:
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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).
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".