Audio Quality of Guests Connecting via Zoom.us

Audio Quality of Guests Connecting via Zoom.us

Even after enabling the “turn on original sound” setting in Zoom, which is the highest audio quality Zoom can deliver, the quality of the VoIP signal audio (and all Zoom recordings) is frustratingly poor.

Recently a couple guests had to join my client’s show via Zoom (because they couldn’t connect any better way) and their sound was so dull, unclear and inarticulate that it required lots of mixing effort on my part to make them sound decent and presentable.

I know that especially due to COVID that lots of folks are learning and using Zoom, but my goodness the audio quality of Zoom is quite bad.

I feel like literally any other method of connecting and recording would sound better (except maybe Skype).

I totally understand that the ease of use of Zoom is why users like it a lot, but of course this comes at a severe cost of audio quality, which it seems most people are willing to accept.

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3 Responses

  1. I used Zoom.us recently because I needed five people on at the same time.

    I wish I hadn’t. I had to remove big chunks of the recording as there was no way to recover from the drop-outs and artefacts introduced from the VoIP connections.

    I need a better alternative to Squadcast when the number of callers exceed the limit.

  2. A relatively recent thing too I believe is that when users put themselves on mute during a call, even when you’re recording, the final saved file will edit out that gap. So if you have two people chatting and recording for 30 minutes, but one was on mute perhaps multiple times for a total of 12 minutes, there will be a 12 minute total gap in their file, which you then have to piece back together…

    I save a master file when recording, which doesn’t do split tracks unfortunately, but does allow me to go back and hear the original recording in case what Zoom gives me doesn’t make sense.

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