Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter • Hacker News Board

Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#351

Post by spockz » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 5:54 PM UTC

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…

It baffles me as well. Especially because I do get feedback like wow your voice “carries”, or it is clear, or that it is “calm”. The best comment I received was that it sounded like I was there in the room and that it captured my voice well. Related to the OP my voice also has been called convincing.

This is with a beyer dynamic microphone extension for a studio headphone. And I have the gain fixed.

Everyone else in our comp keys team sessions has keyboard sound, plops, distortions. But in general it pretty well understandable at the cost of having to spent effort to understand. So maybe software is doing a hell of a job here.

Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#352

Post by strunz » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

hellbannedguy wrote: post #154

fooblat wrote: post #51

It is amazing to me that we still have such a distance between people on this. Some people have basically created a tv studio at home with a nice set, good lighting, nice background, quality camera, and mic. Having a video call with these people is a nice and smooth. And somehow we still have people that think sitting in a noisy, messy room with the sun at their back and using their laptop's built-in mic/speakers is…

And there are people who just don't give a hoot how they look in a video chat.

Why should that be any different than how you look in person?

Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#353

Post by spockz » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 5:58 PM UTC

r1ch wrote: post #340

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 switches can be worse for other listeners as it creates an audible pop every time you mute and unmute on a 3.5mm connection. Digital (USB) mute switches are better.

Why is this? It certainly doesn’t need to be so I suppose?

Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#354

Post by justincormack » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:06 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #320

Cd00d wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I see comments along these lines here all the time, and I don't get it. I'm on zoom a majority of my day, and have maybe two colleagues that don't just use the laptop mic/speake…

I care, but not enough to ask people to QA my setup. I don't know of a way to check how I sound without bothering anyone.

Using the Zoom "record in the cloud" feature should roughly correspond to how people hear you BUT it does not let you know if eg your setup echoes someone else's voice. Bother someone, find a friend, ask your manager, geek out about audio, something.

Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#355

Post by Turing_Machine » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:07 PM UTC

hardwaregeek wrote: post #249

diarrhea wrote: post #2

People vastly undervalue good audio quality. It also often makes the difference (given equal visuals) between great amateur and pro in e.g. the YouTube scene. I didn't have data to back this up before, but I bought a good microphone specifically for this purpose. People will simply like the audio, and by extension what I am saying and also me as a person, better. Meanwhile, my ears will continue to bleed from the awf…

Agreed. My experience from watching some...challenging films in small film festivals is that bad picture can be tolerated, while bad audio will utterly ruin a film.

Just about every resource (books, websites, videos...) for indie film makers makes a point of stressing the absolute importance of good audio, but it's still often ignored.

As you say, people will forgive bad image quality before they will forgive bad audio.

Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#356

Post by ravenstine » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:07 PM UTC

Shameless plug; I recently wrote a blog post about suggestions on improving your audio for remote teamwork:

https://dockyard.com/blog/2021/02/08/improve-your-audio-to-b...

Although I do suggest the Shure MV7 mic, which I use, there are example of really cheap ways to immediately improve how you sound over conference calls.

Another tip I talk about us using RNNoise, which does an excellent job at cutting out background noise while preserving your voice. It's built in to OBS if you ever want to try it.

Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#357

Post by DC1350 » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:11 PM UTC

strunz wrote: post #352

hellbannedguy wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there are people who just don't give a hoot how they look in a video chat.

Why should that be any different than how you look in person?

People won’t complain in person if they’re looking at me from a bad angle or I’m standing near a window

Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#358

Post by criddell » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:16 PM UTC

hctaw wrote: post #337

criddell wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hassle factor is way too high and it doesn't work easily for live streaming from a phone.

I think your fundamental issue might be expecting a phone to be a decent multimedia capture device (phones == content consumption, not content creation). If it's an iPhone and you just care about speech, air pods will be hard to beat.

The Rode product that somebody else mentioned looks like it's worth a try. It's a wireless mic where the receiver plugs into the phone.

Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#359

Post by u678u » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #271

As usual, a lot of people here discuss and suggest some microphone models to improve their sound quality, but I think this is not the biggest factor. Specific models are mostly irrelevant as long as the recording conditions and personal preferences are not known. Some people just hate keeping the mic just in front of their faces, but it's often the only reasonable way to achieve tolerable signal-to-noise ratio (in no…

Count me in as someone that wanted not to use headset but couldn't face talking into a mic. I looked at shotgun mics but it got too expensive quickly and seemed a risk as it wasn't common. Anyone tried?

Re: Higher quality audio makes people sound smarter

#360

Post by rightbyte » Thu, Apr 15, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

formerly_proven wrote: post #269

himinlomax wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People vastly undervalue good audio quality Providers of conferencing tools undervalue audio quality as well, as evidenced by the fact that they don't provide tools that have been common for audio recording for nearly a century, such as simple vu-meters.

Okay, you are suggesting something (level meters, "you are clipping the shit out of your input"-indicators) that would actively improve things. Let me suggest instead that they shall start by not actively harming things. Microsoft Teams is an excellent study subject for "how on earth do you make something this bad while owning all of Skype's IP?".

Ye. How about a simple bar indicator to see if your mic works when you speak.