Using a high end mic for Teams calls?

Nowadays I do a lot of teams call when I work. I have previously used my laptop mic but recently bought the Logitech C270 Webcam and started using that mic instead. When I try and record some audio with it in Audacity, the quality is decent and more than good enough for voice calls. But whenever I have calls in Teams, my sound gets muffled, has a lower bitrate and lacks base.

So the other day I was thinking about maybe buying a better mic, for example something from Elgato but I am wondering, is there any point if I am only going to use it with Teams? Because as I said, Teams seem to compress and lower the quality quit a bit.

Not sure about Teams in particular, but try setting recording quality to 16 bit 44.1kHz to avoid resampling (most voice/conference tools are not good with that).

Teams kills audio. My boss just picked up a Rode NT-USB, and it’s pretty indistinguishable from the built in Macbook mic he was using before.

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How’s your bandwidth? That’s probably what I would fix first.

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Use teams here, everybody uses cheap/built in mics or AirPods or whatever and have had no noticeable audio issues.

As per @adubs and @mazeframe, I’d be looking at teams specific configuration and the network first.

Buying a high end mic for teams is imho most likely a waste of money.

Only high end mic id get is a business headset from jabra or logitech. Depending on how high up you are in the chain. The company may expense that back.

Otherwise a nice samson go mic works quite well for how cheap they are.

This could be due to two things:

  • bandwith issues
  • aggessive noise cancelling by Teams

If you’re into a relatively quiet place try to reduce the noise cancelling to low or even off. That should improve significantly your audio because the difference between Audacity and Teams is the heavy processing the audio goes through when you’re on a Teams call.

Give it a shot and let me know if it worked!

P.S. if you have an RTX GPU I’d suggest you to use Nvidia Broadcast if you’re in a noisy environment while disabling every noise cancelling in the video calling apps you use. It doesen’t kill your audio quality and is insanely good with noise cancelling.

In my experience MS Teams lower the sound quality i dont know if it is the sample rate or some compression, so super high quality mic will not matter too much.

I have noticed in particular that MS Teams does not have Noise supression, so if someone in the meeting has not muted mic and there is keyboard noise or other noise picked up everyone gets to hear it, this gets especially bad if there is a lot of people in the meeting with noise. so you could get a mic that is more focused mic that does not pick up surrounding sounds in the room etc. as much, and having good muting culture for everyone in the meeting helps.

Also (and i thought this was a standard, must-have feature, in an application like this!) MS teams does not have a thresould based slider to adjust what is picked up or broadcasted as your sound, this causes the above problem, i think Push to talk i available but not default, and not as nice :slight_smile:

PS: i also use MS Teams on a daily basis, in combination with Discord, and you really notice when those feature are there in Discord and missing in MS Teams :slight_smile:

My setup is:
Rode NT-USB
Meze 99 Noir headphones connected to the mic

Well I have 500/500 Mbit and I am alone during the weekdays and I use Ethernet so bandwidth should be fine.

I have tried turning of the noise suppresion in teams as I have it dead quiet here during meetings. But the sound quality is still junk, :slight_smile:

Yes but I don’t have any gpu on my work machines but as I said, background noise is not an issue for me.

I also have to use Teams for my company… I use my bluetooth over-ear headphones with A2DP only and the “AntLion Audio ModMic Wireless”. The wireless ModMic is slightly pricey running about €120-€150 but it’s totally worth it…

I use it for Teams and gaming - only thing I physically need to mess with when switching computers is the USB dongle. Love being able to pace around during a Teams call.

The one problem I had was getting HFP to stay disabled in Linux - Teams and TeamSpeak both “recognize” that you have a device capable of Headset functionality and will try switch to HFP mode, but it just left me with no audio whatsoever.

To get around that, editing /etc/pulse/default.pa with “auto_switch=false” to the following line did the trick:

### Automatically load driver modules for Bluetooth hardware
.ifexists module-bluetooth-policy.so
load-module module-bluetooth-policy auto_switch=false
.endif
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