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Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

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Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#441

Post by goostavos »

macintux wrote: post #293
ballenf wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical mute button with red LED mute status is a killer feature. Got a wired Plantronics headset with USB-C that I'm happy with. Not sure if the above products have this feature, but I recommend checking for it.

> Physical mute button with red LED mute status is a killer feature. I had a headset with that feature, and sure enough, it failed me on a sales call. I groaned at something our salesperson said, and despite the button having been pressed and the light being on, everyone heard me.

As someone who recently forgot they were still sharing their screen while simultaneously starting to chat with a colleague about how incompetent the person currently talking is... I feel your particular kind of pain.

Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#442

Post by egypturnash »

nvarsj wrote: post #229
benkuhn wrote: post #13

It's also really easy to have high quality audio! The author recommends a "podcasting" microphone, but a $35 standalone headset mic[1] is almost as good and much easier to use. If you want to hear a comparison, I got kind of obsessed with this problem at one point and took some comparison recordings here[2]. (You need a standalone mic since most headsets, even really nice ones, have really bad mics because most heads…

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 hav…

> 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.)

Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#443

Post by sahaskatta »

yarcob wrote: post #364
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who knows nothing about audio: wouldn't it make more sense to get a top quality microphone and apply post-processing, rather than deliberately getting inferior hardware?

Dynamic mics are usually directional and less sensitive to background noise. If you talk into them from the right side they'll mostly pick up your voice. A lot of echo will be rejected because it comes from a different direction. Condenser mics are a lot more sensitive and omnidirectional. They are great in a studio to pick up every detail, but if you use them in a normal room you'll end up with lots of echo/reverb w…

It's unfortunate that this article recommends a condenser mic at the end. In my opinion, most people who need better audio for video calls are better served with a dynamic mic. Very few people have a bedroom or office room with proper acoustic treatment. A dynamic mic will be better for most consumers trying to get better audio for Zoom, Meet, Teams, etc.

Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#444

Post by trhway »

with Zoom/etc. one can also add voice cleaner/improver similar to that software that makes a pop-star singer out of a nobody. Instead of bubbling you will be delivering into the ears of your team like the Voice was delivering the Commandments to Moses.

Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#445

Post by kthejoker2 »

stcredzero wrote: post #329
nvarsj wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

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 not…

> 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-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.”

Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#447

Post by gregwebs »

benkuhn wrote: post #13

It's also really easy to have high quality audio! The author recommends a "podcasting" microphone, but a $35 standalone headset mic[1] is almost as good and much easier to use. If you want to hear a comparison, I got kind of obsessed with this problem at one point and took some comparison recordings here[2]. (You need a standalone mic since most headsets, even really nice ones, have really bad mics because most heads…

I love the modularity of the boom mike attaching to existing headphones. I have been using a Bluetooth adapter which keeps things modular. You can plugin a wired headset to it. Of course, keep things wired when talking with someone else. But you can reuse that wired headset as Bluetooth when you just want to listen and want to roam around. https://www.amazon.com/Mpow-Bluetooth-Receiver-Connection-Ha...

Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#448

Post by esolyt »

owenversteeg wrote: post #422
nvarsj wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

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.)

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.

Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#449

Post by httpsterio »

owenversteeg wrote: post #422
nvarsj wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

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.)

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.

Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#450

Post by crazygringo »

jakebasile wrote: post #434
crazygringo wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're never going to be as sharp, or as bright, as a nice fast lens on a quality camera. If you've got decent lighting, that's not true. My Logitech C920 -- the most popular webcam of all time -- outputs a fully sharp 1080p. With normal front lighting, it handles 30 fps perfectly without visible noise, i.e. full brightness. There's zero quality difference versus using my DSLR. It's as sharp and as bright. Now sur…

No amount of lighting can make up for the difference in sensor size, quality, resolution let alone the aperture and quality optics of a photographic lens. I'm sorry but you're just incorrect here. It might be minimal at Zoom resolution but it's absolutely there.

My point is that all of those things you're talking about are already at full quality in a Logitech C920 for 1080p.

The sensor size, the resolution, the aperture, the optics -- they're all sufficient. There's nothing to improve upon that will yield a measureable difference. There's no distortion, no chromatic abberation, no noise with decent lighting, nothing.

Everything you're talking about matters if you're dealing with low light, or zooming in, or you want depth of field, or 60fps, etc etc etc.

But what precise detail do you claim is better at 1080p with the DSLR? Because from your list, it's not resolution. You don't want a larger aperture because you don't want depth of field on videoconferencing. And "quality optics" means nothing -- if there's already no distortion, no blurring and no aberration at 1080p, then there's no more quality to be found.

It's just the physics of photography and sensors. Photographic equipment is designed around thresholds of quality. If your equipment is already above the threshold you need, even better equipment makes zero difference.

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