Microphones for Zoom meetings

Since the lockdowns started in March, Zoom meetings have become an intgral part of of a typical workday. Like most people, I was just using my AirPods Pro, until I dropped one of them and something went wrong with the noise cancellation. They still work, but when I speak I hear myself echoed in the right earbud, which ended up being very annoying. I wanted to get a Blue Yeti USB microphone to replace them, but at this point they were all sold out. I figured a small simple solution would be to get a wireless lavalier mic. This is pretty much as unobtrusive as the AirPods Pro.

Unfortunately, I discovered the lavalier mic sounded terrible. Maybe because I got a pretty cheap one, but when using the "Test Mic" feature in Zoom with it I figured I wouldn't want to bother anyone with such bad audio. Instead I got a popular condensor microphone and an audio interface, the next best thing after a Blue Yeti USB microphone (which were still sold out).

When testing the condensor microphone in Zoom's "Test Mic" feature I was very disappointed, it sounded terrible. I tried recording the mic in Quicktime, and it sounded much better!

As a demonstration, here is a recording using a shotgun mic recorded directly from the source, and a captured recording of what the "Test Mic" feature sounds like in Zoom with the same microphone.

What I heard from the "Test Mic" feature sounded much worse than anyone had ever sounded in a Zoom meeting for me. I was wondering if my audio actually sounded that bad on the end of a receiver. To test this, I set up a Zoom meeting between my laptop and my desktop, and recorded microphone tests as they sounded on the receiving laptop transmitted from the desktop with the microphone plugged in. It turns out the "Test Mic" feature is nowhere near representative of the actual sound of the microphone over Zoom.

While I had this set up, I recorded several different options for microphones for the sake of a comparison. I also recorded local native microphone samples to learn in what ways Zoom distorts audio.

There are a number of options in Zoom to disable various audio filters, but I couldn't understand what they did, so I left them all on the defaults.

Here is the collection of all microphones I tested with this setup. Most interesting is probably the right hand column of audio clips that demonstrates what the different microphones sounds like over a Zoom meeting.

This taught me that the condensor microphone actually soundeed very good. But I had also gotten a shotgun microphone to replace my condensor microphone. While the condensor microphone has great sound, it is very large and needs to be very close to your mouth when using it. It was always covering my view of the screen and my keyboard, a shotgun microphone can be further away to not ubscure your view of the screen.

It turned out the wireless lavalier mic still sounded very bad, I'm not sure why. It is unfortunate, because it would definitaly be more convenient than a large wired microphone connected to an audio interface which takes up an annoying amount of desk space.

I was also surprised to learn the AirPods Pro sounds pretty bad over Zoom too. A common first tip for good Zoom meeting audio is to use any headset instead of the microphone built into your computer or webcam. But at least to my ears the built in microphones in my iMac, my webcam, and my laptop all sound better than than the AirPods Pro. This could be another symptom of them being slighly broken.

Taking all the recorded microphones, I ranked them by listening to them pairwise and deciding which one I thought sounded better. I also thought about which options were more convenient, using subjective considerations such as whether they are wired, comfortable, mobile, taking up space, etc. The figure below summarizes how I would rank the microphone options along both axes.

Zoom meetings are exhaustng, to the point where I have no interest what so ever to attend any of the upcoming remote versions of conferences. I feel very bad for students who have to endure remote school days and lectures. There are many reasons Zoom meetings are tiring, but I belieave a major reason is the poor audio quality from the people speaking.

This comparison helped me decide between my options. I wish wireless options were better so I could more easily take meetings away from my work desk to get some more variety into my workday.