Like many, I'd guess, I'm now using apps like Zoom now that I hadn't much used before.
Picture and sound quality seems to vary dramatically. Sometimes not bad, sometimes very poor. With the important part, the sound, seeing to suffer the worst. Not much point in seeing someone if you can barely understand what they're saying, due to a low data rate.
Is it their equipment (phone or whatever) or the internet links that are making all the differences?
Unless using *very* ancient hardware, almost certainly bandwidth somewhere in the link.
Internet congestion or other issue that affects latency or transfer rate mostly. Live video and sound are highly timing-dependent, obviously.
If you use pro videoconferencing or proper IP telephony you'd generally set up QoS (quality of service) to prioritise the traffic over any other stuff, but of course, over the Internet as a whole that cannot be quaranteed. Every bit of pixelisation or garbled bit of speech is basically packet loss, because as it is real time, if something arrives out-of-order or too late, it has to be thrown away. In a normal download, or streaming music, you can just build up a buffer and wait for re-transmission, but that's no good for real-time, so compression increases to try to reduce data rate (and therefore hopefully improve latency a bit). If we use the videoconference equipment at work over a LAN it is amazingly clear, if it goes over the Internet quality drops accordingly.
On some video meetings with colleagues over the last few weeks, it's been noticeable that the ones on the same ISP as I am are that bit clearer, as the latency is lower and the bitrate better. Generally even a cheap smartphone or laptop has a camera good enough for decent quality.
And a lot of people are finding that the 16 Mbps ADSL connection that is fine for downloading doesn't cope very well when the upload speed is only 1 Mbps or lower, which they don't normally do, but videoconferencing taxes both directions of the link.
At 1 Mbps up I find even sending large emails can cause connection timeouts.
Owain
Ah yes, but some of us remember dialup, when we could only dream of 56kb/s
Hah. I remember the first time I saw a dialup connection.
300/300 was a dream then. Most of us walked to the terminal rooms on campus.Owain
And I remember broadband with only 0.07 Mbps download. That was on 02/12/2019. The day before we got FTTP installed.
Thank heaven for having fibre made available - because I invoked political routes to put pressure on Openreach. It wasn't always as bad as 0.07, but it was very often appalling and never higher than 5 Mbps. With correspondingly awful upload. At least having usable broadband has helped hugely.
Its normally the other ends bandwidth according to zoom themselves. It improves if you use audio only but then I guess that would be so. Pity there is no way of trading one off against the other. Its not just zoom though is it, MS teams GoogleLook and Skype are just the same. I don't recall hearing what the minimum specs are though. Brian
One other thing is try to stop other people using webcam mikes they are notoriously crap and of course too far away to be very good. Use separate mikes close to the speaking personage. Brian
Counter-intuitively I've found the exact opposite ...
When I started using skype for business about 3 years ago, I bought an external USB audio interface providing phantom power for XLR mics, first tried a large cardioid mic, got endless complaints about it being too quiet (I do speak quietly) also tried a lav mic, not much better, maybe I got the "wrong" type i.e. directional vs omni.
Later I updated my webcam to HD logitech C920 I tried using its built in (array of?) mics and haven't had a single complaint since, the behringer box is relegated to being a headphone amp.
As I it here my webcam mike is about 12" away. Perfect distance in a quiet environment.
Any closer and breath noise starts to be an issue.
Also for vocal clarity one wants to curtail the bass and extreme treble. We are not recording opera, we are trying to talk to people
It is a constant surprise to me how good modern microphone capsules are
I suppose we have to be thankful for a interest topic that spurred the developments of home cine & video, home computer graphics, a deregulated 'free' internet and got us this high speed broadband.
If Mary Whitehouse ...
My laptop sets the gain automatically. Works on both the internal mic and a headset - where the mic is very close to the mouth.
I'd expect it to do the same with any mic - assuming the same software is accessing it.
However 'web' mics seem to have a very bright frequency response. Dunno if this is the mic itself or tweaked in software. A decent studio mic will be nearer flat.
when I use Zoom, I am offered a "check mic level" screen
Maybe the OP's mic was a real capacitor mic, rather then an electret one; I doubt the automatic level control would work with that.
Quite. If you play with it you'll find it over-rides any manual settings.
Not quite sure why the type of mic would make the slightest difference?
It's one of these ...
Fed into one of these ...
glad to see I'm not the only one who buys from thomann
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