Excellent online meeting audio

Daniel Rubio

1. Upgraded audio
2. Excellent audio ←

You should upgrade your online meeting audio, because bad audio makes online meetings unnecessarily tiring. You don’t have to stop there: if you have a bigger budget, you could sound excellent in meetings.

The other love language

A few years ago, I worked on a fully-remote team that had two love languages: a rich vocabulary of reaction emoji and excellent audio. We got the latter from two things the company had:

1. values of empathy and inclusion – so we cared about our colleagues’ meeting experience
2. a home office equipment budget – so we could upgrade our audio even more.

When I joined the company, I had already upgraded to a cheap headset, which made me easy to hear in calls. But it still had a cheap microphone, and didn’t sound excellent. I wanted to upgrade again, to sound as good as my teammates.

Office equipment

We compared home office set-ups in our #office-equipment Slack channel. Our resident audio nerd posted a microphone product guide, for everyone who wanted something better than a cheap headset:

1. mid-range – USB microphones (typically condenser microphones)
2. high-end – podcast dynamic microphone
3. ridiculous – studio dynamic microphone.

I opted for the relatively high-end option of a Røde Podmic podcast microphone, Røde PSA1+ microphone boom arm, and an Arturia Minifuse 2 audio interface, for various reasons.

Choosing a USB microphone used to mean getting a lower quality microphone. Today, I could probably get the same audio quality from a microphone with a built-in audio interface. This changed because of a new market for high-quality desktop microphones connected to a computer: hipsters making podcasts.

Podcast microphones

The explosion of podcasts created a market for amateur audio quality what the 1980s’ desktop publishing revolution did for amateur print layout and typography. Podcast microphone gives you a convenient category for a high-quality microphone designed for home use, with a computer, and targeting speech, rather than singing or musical instruments.

Within the podcast marketing category, you still have different kinds of microphones to choose from. In particular, dynamic microphones sound different to condenser microphones.

Dynamic microphones

If you can afford it, you’ll sound better with a dynamic microphone instead of a condenser microphone. Condenser microphones sound different because they pick up more details and sound from further away, including background noise and room acoustics. You have to position a dynamic microphone much closer to your mouth, to allow for this.

A dynamic microphone deliveres the familiar more direct radio DJ sound of someone much closer to you, without background noise or reverberation from the room. It also means you can recreate that silky smooth late-night radio DJ sound, by lowering your voice, and moving really close to the microphone.

Online executive presence

You don’t need to sound like a radio DJ, although it does add a certain something to presentations. But sounding physically closer to your audience sounds more engaging than a room that echoes, or the slightly muffled result of meeting software background noise removal. Excellent audio give remote workers the first step towards online executive presence.