A Brigada participant asked this week, “Is anyone else having trouble maximizing sound quality over zoom?” He’s looking for solutions either for tweeking zoom or finding another platform (especially for international sharing). He mentioned several meetings with international guests in which the talking was great but audio tracks in music not so much. Any suggested solutions? If you have an idea, please click Comment.
8) Maximizing Your Audio on Zoom
A lot depends on what you’re doing with a Zoom meeting. Although Zoom is popular, it’s not necessarily the best tool for every type of meeting. Remember that Zoom is a business-grade tool that’s designed for business meetings. It works pretty well for the intended design, but there can be quirks. The design focus tends to be for workgroups, as well as for one-to-many type interactions, such as presentations. Although Zoom has a separate webinar tool, the basic tool does webinars decently. On the other hand, I know that Zoom doesn’t necessarily things like live music well, although it’s fine for a participant streaming audio from a shared screen. Thus, Zoom tends not to work well for something like streaming a live church service.
Some issues are beyond Zoom’s capacity to address, especially with group interaction. That includes the quality of Internet connections by individual participants (e.g., the difference between somebody participating over an LTE 2G connection with only one bar of signal from a cell phone, somebody participating over a satellite internet connection, or somebody working in an office from a high-grade business setup, with plenty of bandwidth). Both the cell phone and the satellite will impose problems whether overall quality of video or sound, or signal latency delay (e.g., the time it takes a signal to get to/from satellite).
Remember also that for any Internet connection, the speed of upload (or in the context of Zoom, transmitting) is only a small fraction of available download speeds. Thus, others indicate that your sound is bad, it can be useful to turn off your camera — or at least set the camera to not use High Definition, so that your outbound connection is maximizing the amount of bandwidth available to the audio. Although there’s lots of positives of having an active camera, not every meeting requires it.
You can also improve overall sound quality by using a dedicated device (e.g., earbuds or headset) for your sound, rather than using what’s built into a laptop computer or cell phone. On most computers and phones, the quality of built-in audio (both mic and speakers) is not good. With a computer, it may be difficult to get a built-in mic close enough to your face, and there’s a lot more issues with background noise. With built-in speakers, there’s no amplifiers, and if you turn up the volume high enough to hear adequately, it’s often at the max capacity of the device, where there’s a lot of distortion of the sound quality. Cell phones are especially bad, where the speaker output is frequently not audible at much more than arm’s distance.
Using a headset or earbuds allows for overall better quality sound, as well as better placement of output speakers next to your ears, and microphones next to your mouth. And also better insulating you from background noise.
For what it’s worth, the same principle applies to cameras, especially in laptop computers. An external camera will give you a lot better picture than a built-in camera, and if the camera includes a microphone, the sound quality for that will usually be better than a mic that’s built into a computer. However, the microphone on a headset will generally be better than a camera’s mic.
Thanks Zogo for a very informative and detailed response.
In the Advanced audio settings, you can make some adjustments to how Zoom will process the audio. I would suggest that you enable Show in-meeting option to “Enable Original Sound” from microphone. They used to have more options in the app but now only Auto or Aggressive Noise cancellation.
You need to experiment to see if it makes a difference with how you use Zoom in your calls. I am not sure if the settings will only apply to sound from your microphone or if they will also be applied to sound played when you share an application with sound.
In an early Sept 2020 update, Zoom added a High Fidelity Music Mode in Advanced Settings. It will require additional bandwidth for the meetings. I have not yet tested to see what difference it makes.