Ask HN: Are people oblivious to their audio quality in meetings?

That most consumer products, like TV sets, consoles, monitors - to this day - include barely listenable audio quality suggests that, yeah, audio is usually an afterthought. Youtube videos and podcasts seem to be having an effect on that, slowly. Muddy reverb that masks the listenability of irreplaceable interviews is getting rarer.

I use an Elgato Wave:3 and AirPod Pros. Great combo.

I used a headset yesterday - and I had no idea if the sound was good / bad or great.

I tried to test the level using the zoom app - and it made me feel that the mic with the logitec H540 was not picking up as well as my older logi headset was.. but that could be the app not showing well or maybe it was showing fine and I was just used to / expecting it to give visual indicator all the way to the edge of the moving graphic when I raised my voice - but it did not..

I ended up using google meet - and did not get any complaints about being hard to hear.. but I really want some visual indicators to show me more info - and I guess a record and play back at different voice levels - would be nice to get an idea of how things would sound to those on the other end of a video call.

Of course what others hear will also depend if they are listening via headset, good or bad headphones, a laptop speaker or 3.1 system and such.

About speakerphone, one pet peeve of mine is echo reduction algorithms. They basically turn the conversation into half-duplex. It means that in practice only one person can speak at a time which breaks many aspects of a natural conversation like interrupting each other or acoustically nodding to signify understanding.

I get it, hearing yourself in echo is atrocious, but so is half-duplex so please do your interlocutor a favor and turn off speaker.

No one cares that much about audio quality; being able to hear the other person clearly and loud enough is usually fine for most meetings; everyone cares about video quality, though.