Easy tips to make you sound great on Zoom (or Teams, FaceTime etc.)

One of the most important aspects of video, is the audio. People will be distracted and lose interest when the audio isn’t up to scratch. Of course, if you can make the video better, then go for it! Though good cameras can be expensive, and good audio equipment, less so! 

First of all, it’s important that, where possible, you use headphones. If you don’t wear headphones, your microphone will be picking up both what you’re saying, as well as the feedback from other people in the call that’s coming through your speakers. Now, pretty much all video conference software tries to overcome this by muting your microphone when you aren’t talking. By and large, it works, but you’ll sometimes find the start of sentences muted, and it can struggle when you’ve got a bit of ambient noise around.  

By wearing headphones, your microphone only picks up what the other participants need to hear. 

Often, those headphones you get inside the box with a new phone have a built-in microphone and improve the audio quality quite a bit! The positioning of the microphone is perfect for picking up much better audio. 

You’ll notice the audio is much less echoey compared to the built-in computer microphone. It’s also subject to less processing, so you can hear a much wider range of frequencies, giving a deeper, warmer sound. 

One thing to note on headphones; If you must use Bluetooth or wireless headphones, manually set your computer to use the microphone built into itself, and not the microphone in the Bluetooth headphones. When you try to use Bluetooth headphones to call people, you’ll notice that they’ll kick you off the high-quality mode that they usually operate with, in favour of a much lower quality setting that supports two way audio - that’s audio from your computer or phone from the other participants in your call to the headphones, and then the built in microphones in the headset picking up your voice, and sending it back to everyone else. 

If that sounds a little confusing to do, my suggestion would be even if you’ve got swanky wireless headphones, to stick to the freebie ones you got with your phone.