Be Aware: Some Earbuds Feed Back Within Themselves

Sometimes when you connect with a guest to record an episode, you will hear your voice coming back on the guests audio on a slight delay and at a relatively low volume. There can be several reasons for this, but one reason can be that the guests earbuds themselves are feeding your voice back to you.

This is because some wired earbuds feed back within themselves. When the guest hears your voice, some of your voice bleeds into their earbuds microphone. And there’s no fix for this because it’s a hardware issue within the earbuds themselves.

Note: The feedback will get louder the more the guest cranks up their monitor volume in the earbuds.

Whenever this problem occurs, I ask guests to turn down their monitor volume as much as they can while still being able to hear other participants, of course. This minimizes (and usually eliminates!) the feedback on their track.

If the feedback is too loud and ruining the audio, you can:

• Ask the guest if they have any other headphones/earbuds they can use.
• Use the echo-cancellation feature in platforms like Squadcast and Zencastr. This will eliminate the feedback, but then of course you’ll have to deal with the “ducking” problem — when 2 people talk at the same time, one of them will literally be muted.

Have you ever dealt with this problem?

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