The audio comparison is disingenuous because the levels are not normalized in any way. Once you normalize the levels the difference between Macbook and Shure, while noticeable, is not really something I'd call "radical".
I disagree. The Shure sounded like he was speaking, or whispering in my ear, depending on the output volume. This makes sense, as this was recorded from a distance of 10cm from his face.
This made me wonder, apearantly I (I would say we, but you did not) can hear the distance something is recorded at, separately from the volume. How cool are our ears.
Agreed (with @navane). The Shure recording, as presented, is definitely louder than the other two. However, when I reduce it and play it back-to-back with the laptop mic, the Shure is pretty radically better. (I'm using a mid-range set of headphones.)
What's surprising to me is how good the laptop mic is, despite the hurdles working against it.
I agree that level matching is important when the goal is to make accurate subjective quality judgments. This is very well understood in the audio industry.
Rather than microphone quality, the differences between the samples are primarily attributable to microphone position and technique: specifically, being 10 cm from the mic produces something people like better than being 60 cm away. The main issue with the MacBook mic is that it's inconvenient to get close to it.
The advice to get a boom to make it easier to bring an outboard mic into optimal position without strain is excellent and highly practical, IMO.
The one big quality outlier is the Airpod Max sample, which exhibits compression artifacts and rolled off high end (and low end, but that matters less). It is substantially worse than all the other options. (It probably has worse latency, too.)
The iPad Pro sample isn't great either, probably because the mic is off-axis when speaking into it from a natural position. Again, the degradation is primarily a result of suboptimal microphone position and technique rather than component quality.
All that effort, then comes the actual video call software and blows the quality to smithereens, and you're back to yelling at a speaker connected to the mic socket and recording using the GameBoy camera add-on dipped in molasses.
It's really frustrating, I also cared to set up a decent input, but all of Google Meet, Slack, and Zoom have terrible terrible compression.
We're also using Tandem (http://tandem.chat), which looks fantastic in comparison. Not sure exactly why. Resolution is still 480k, but the frame rate is noticeably higher, and possibly the compression rate as well.
I'm indeed surprised how much of a difference frame rate makes. I use Jitsi a lot privately and it seems to prioritise frame rate over frame quality. At work we use ms teams which seems to do the opposite. The Teams footage looks crisper but every time I'm on Jitsi I have this "wow this looks real" feeling.
Of course lighting is also really important as many cheap cams have sensors too small to do 30fps in low light. Let alone 60 which I think no current video conferencing product does.
I gave up carting my webcam and stuff around with me - in 90% of zoom meetings it makes essentially no difference. I'm sure there's some specific scenario where Zoom will send actual HD video but they're pretty rare.
The author points out that remote working is solving the "expensive places to live" problem, yet moved to a studio in Paris which are awfully expensive. I am quite of puzzled by this.
Of course, if the author gets the North American salary instead of the European one, while living in Paris, then things might work out financially.
I moved in the deep suburbs of Paris because rent and apartment prices are a no go for a single income person, even in tech.
In general you're right of course, but it still solves the problem that you may not HAVE to move to the expensive place anymore. Of course you still CAN, like the author chose to.
And as someone who never moved away from where he was born and also never lived in the really expensive part of the city, it might solve the problem of many more people just moving here to work, whereas they would prefer living more remotely. I would love to stay here, for example, not just because of work because I've lived here all my life and like it.
Also your (and the author's) mention of a studio confused me for quite a bit, we'd never call anything 30m2 a studio where I live :P
> In general you're right of course, but it still solves the problem that you may not HAVE to move to the expensive place anymore. Of course you still CAN, like the author chose to.
> And as someone who never moved away from where he was born and also never lived in the really expensive part of the city, it might solve the problem of many more people just moving here to work, whereas they would prefer living more remotely. I would love to stay here, for example, not just because of work because I've lived here all my life and like it.
I lived in rural land before moving in the Paris suburbs in order to land a job. In some ways I am glad I had to. It opened me to so many new stuff. I would not imagine enjoying my twenties in rural land personally. The trade of housing space for commodities, almost car free living and infrastructure is currently worth it for me. Maybe I will go back rural in my 30's now that full remote is gaining traction. Or maybe not. I get your point though.
> Also your (and the author's) mention of a studio confused me for quite a bit, we'd never call anything 30m2 a studio where I live :P
The nomenclature we use in France (IIRC) is studio for a single room, and then 1 bedroom, 2 bedroom, etc.. no matter the floor size. How would you call it? And where do you live so we have context in naming things? :)
I’ve long felt that the decentralization of the San Francisco tech scene is great news for New York… for the price I’d much rather be in Manhattan than somewhere that fancies itself a quaint small town.
I live in flyover country, most new work seems to be from Manhattan based firms. Unfortunately the tax situation in the boroughs is driving employers away
If you note, I said I moved back to a studio apartment in Paris. Not a cheap area even if I didn’t live in the center of town but definitely didn’t move there by choice either.
I think you’re mixing two points I’m making. None of the point about offices in city centers and expensive neighborhoods relates to my personal experience. It was a general point about the futility of office-obsession on the part of companies, which was particularly bad even for startups in the Paris area back in 2015/2017. Hopefully it’s better now. But I remember people looking at me like I was mad for saying remote was non-negotiable.
> If you note, I said I moved back to a studio apartment in Paris. Not a cheap area even if I didn’t live in the center of town but definitely didn’t move there by choice either.
May I ask the reason of work was not the one? I know I would not want to go back in the country side for now, given the limited public transportation and medical infrastructure out there.
> I think you’re mixing two points I’m making. None of the point about offices in city centers and expensive neighborhoods relates to my personal experience. It was a general point about the futility of office-obsession on the part of companies, which was particularly bad even for startups in the Paris area back in 2015/2017. Hopefully it’s better now. But I remember people looking at me like I was mad for saying remote was non-negotiable.
Sorry if I misread or interpreted things too quickly. From what I am witnessing in the area, you currently can :
1 - Go full remote in the country side and have your pay reduced. Job security takes a hit too, because the job market is not "hot" like in the US.
2 - Agree to come to the office 2/3 times a week and go live in the suburbs (or stay in town if you can afford it and enjoy it)
I currently using option 2. Maybe I am missing g other options.
I wonder if there's some economic connotation as well, bad audio makes you seem less wealthy, which is another factor people (unfairly) associate with intelligence.
Great article. My favorite part is that the author advises against overly complicated setups and has some very realistic recommendations instead:
> The strange video you see at the top of this post was filmed with this setup. One that I actively recommended against to any fellow remoter. Particularly folks who aren’t into photography or videography. It’s cumbersome, complex, and requires constant fidgeting to keep the camera on, obtain a consistent color temperature, or prevent automatic focus hunting due to shallow depth of field.
This is a common theme among people with overly complicated setups: Looks and sounds great when it works, but they're fighting with their setup in every other meeting: Focus issues, automatic power off problems, photographic cameras overheating because they weren't designed for long streams, audio issues as they work to select the microphone they want instead of something else, and so on.
This page recommends two excellent webcam-style USB cameras that won't deliver the professional-looking blurred background images, but they will just work when you plug them in and they won't be full of surprises. That's more valuable than a blurred background or crisp 4K video through expensive lenses when you're just a small H.265 compressed square on someone's screen.
Initially, I've set up my DSLR, through purchased copy of SparkoCam. Continuous video ring light, green screen behind me, nice zoom for proper proportions of face and nice replaced background.
Insert months of tripping over cables, tripod, camera, green screen; dropping video because something on complex chain gave up; the laptop fan running like a jet airliner; and just general pain-in-the-kiester of it all. Now I have a logitech Brio in front of me. Nowhere near as nice, but more than good enough... and I haven't thought of it since I installed it :)
(I still have a small ring light, because lighting is important as the article indicates, for clarity of facial emotions and context )
The Shure SM7B is a very popular microphone, but for a remote meetings use case I'd suggest starting with a quality XLR capable audio interface (this is a requirement for the 7B anyway) and a Shure SM57 mic.
The reason I suggest not starting with an SM7B is because this microphone is expensive at nearly $400, and requires high quality mic preamps to get a proper signal out of the mic (often people add a $150 cloudlifter) which adds to the expense.
The SM57 on the other hand is an excellent XLR dynamic microphone, used on countless recordings and live sound applications. It is super durable, and can be purchased used at around $50.
Plus Shure makes an optional $20 foam windscreen for the SM57 called the "A2WS" which helps filter out pops and plosives, and makes the mic look similar to a 7b.
I'd recommend checking out the SSL2, Universal Audio Volt and Focusrite Scarlett. IMO always worth shopping used too.
I'd avoid the super cheap Behringers, M-Audios, and the like. These will typically be noisy and have essentially no resale value in the future, while quality brands hold most of their value and can be re-sold later if/when upgrading.
Can confirm, my Presonus Audiobox works well enough and passes through just fine to the windows VM I use for AV stuff. Still needed another amp though.
I bought a behringer UMC-22 this week for ~$60. I went down a huge rabbit hole, and it seems like at about $120 you run into the focusrite Scarlett (solo, I needed two channels so $169), and for an upgrade of $20, you can get the new Universal Audio Volt II (again, I needed two channels, the solo channel is cheaper).
My use case is remote guitar lessons. I need an instrument in and a microphone in. My Microphone is the Audio Technica ATR2100 I bought a few years back.
After doing a lot of research, I bought the behringer with the agreement that if I use it enough and it’s a limiting factor on what I’m doing, I will upgrade to the UA Volt II when it actually is on sale and not just pre-order. But the limiting factor in my signal chain is the compression on Skype… so I just went with a cheapie interface it gets the job done. There is some noise I pick up when monitoring with Sony MDR-V6’s and I need the volume up pretty high to get good direct monitoring levels, but overall testing has gone well.
Again, if I had a more important use case or I was recording, I’d spend for the focusrite or just wait for the UA Volt II. But this is “Streets Ahead” of just using a laptop mic with my electric guitar unplugged (or to my headphones) because my kid is sleeping. The other option I had was just to swap between microphone and guitar, but that made lessons awkward.
https://vdo.ninja may provide better quality in terms of audio/video and lower latency than Skype.
It's a different approach, and has more buttons/knobs, but provides a high quality and free solution supporting rooms and multiple participants. Can be incorporated into OBS as well for recording, streaming etc.
I've found it to be a useful tool for connecting with musicians remotely.
But I specifically do not recommend the Shure SM7B in the post, if you read it or even skip to my recommendation table toward the end of the post. I highly recommend the Rose NT-USB instead. No interface needed, live feedback in-mic with a headphone jack and return control (volume mix of computer sound vs. your own mic feedback), solid construction. It’s not the cheapest but it’s one of the best I’ve seen in a long time. I even demonstrate it in the post.
I think you’re asking something very difficult. The specific point I make in the post is that mirrorless cameras have varying degrees of clean HDMI output support, varying levels of fussiness about being on for extended periods of time, and many other quirks that make them hard to recommend period. Let alone bargain hunting.
The A6000 is among the most reasonably priced and dependable mirrorless cameras that you can use but it’ll still set you back around $1000 new and you’ll need a lens, and an acquisition card (Elgato Cam Link), etc. This is why my post recommends against mirrorless cameras for a huge majority of even tech-savvy folks.
Specifically because A/V tech savviness and computer tech savviness are far from wide overlaps in expertise.
Thanks for the answer. That makes sense. I wouldn’t use it for streaming or webcam though. I think my main use case would be to record myself and then edit the raw videos. So I assume for that you don’t need extra hardware besides the camera and the lens.
My idea is that I could also plug the mic directly into the camera. I like how the A6000 looks and I only need it for recording so I wonder if there’s some slightly cheaper mirrorless that can produce similar quality.
There's been a vacuum in high quality web cameras for a while, most of the market has just been junk.
A good microphone is totally worth it too. I'm not sure why after over a year of pandemic and remote work many are still using their 720p webcam in a dark (sometimes backlit) room with the crappy built-in mic. If you're making good money invest in a decent set up - with mostly remote comms, it matters more than you think.
I use an S55H hanging from a pulley, boxing ring-style, just high enough to be out of the video frame unless I'm trying to show it off, into a Cloudlifter and Scarlett Solo. As a veteran of several remote-first company audio wars, I have gotten many compliments on this rig. All this to say, it's hard to go wrong with a condenser mic and a cloudlifter into a decent audio interface. My camera game (iMac Facetime camera) is however fairly wack.
I searched that microphone, and you weren’t kidding about boxing ring style… If I got that I would likely start every meeting with “LET’S GET READY TO XXXXXXXXXXXX”, where X is some awful word like AGILE or IDEATE or BRAINSTORM.
Ok, one reality I find this does not address is that not all of us have a nice silent space to work in, and most Mic's don't perform well in that space.
In my case, I live in a one room Studio Loft with my wife, who is in meetings all day and is quite a loud speaker. Pretty much any boom/desktop Mic I've tried is also really good at picking her up.
My current workaround is to use a unidirectional headset microphone[1], But would love other ideas, as cable management is a bit cumbersome.
Have you tried a supercardioid dynamic mic with a pre-amp (like the sm7 in the post)? These mics have a fairly tight pickup pattern, especially with higher frequencies and with a pre-amp you can adjust the gain so that it really only picks up when you are very nearly touching it.
Also, deadening your environment goes a looooonnnng way to cutting down on background pickup noise. rugs, acoustic panels, divider curtains etc.
It's a bit better than my AT2020. But I find that in order to get my Gain down low enough so that my partner isn't too distracting, I have to be right on the Mic.
You may have already done this, but in case if not.
The pickup pattern is going to be mostly right in front of the mic, with the best rejection from the rear. Keep in mind the mic will also pick up reflections if there is a wall close behind you.
So ideally you’d sit in front of the mic with no wall or a wall at an oblique angle behind you, and your wife across the room directly behind the mic.
And generally every single mic recommendation I give in the linked post has a cardioid pickup pattern which is precisely what can help isolate stray noise in places with louder environments. Software like Zoom will do the rest of the work for you depending on how aggressive the noise control settings are. Zoom is surprisingly good at eliminating echo, feedback, and other non-speaker-voice noises from the mic signal.
Stray far and wide from omnidirectional pickup patterns in microphones because they will unfortunately be far too sensitive to environmental noise. This is also true with many noise-canceled mic/earbuds combos which cancel noise for the person wearing it but not for the people receiving the mic audio recorded in the noisy space.
Thanks, I've tried a few USB Cardoid mics already, and it still picks my wife up loud and clear. I haven't yet tried a supercardoid, or to get a mic amp that allows gain adjustment. So might give that a try.
Wondering how the 2021 MacBook Pro camera stacks up to the 2019 one. I did my first Zoom call with my 16” M1 Max yesterday and the quality seemed to be quite a lot better (although I coincidentally improved the lighting near my desk a bit, as well).
As someone who has been working remotely for almost a decade at this point, I will say straight out that a built-in camera on a recent laptop is mostly just fine. What you need to concern yourself with is /position/ of the camera and /lighting/.
Do these three simple things to make your video better:
1. Get a laptop stand that raises your laptop so your eye level is towards the center of the screen. Not only does this improve ergonomics, it improves the positioning of the camera for video.
2. Get a lamp that you can move the head on and point it at the wall behind the laptop (assuming it's white-ish in color) to provide reflected back light at your face from behind the camera, and then add as much ambient light as possible in the room emanating from the corners (smaller rooms are easier to light). You don't need anything fancy, although yes a ring-light is probably "better" you can get by with cheap floor lamps from Walmart and some "daylight" color temperature bulbs.
3. Make sure all the lightbulbs in the room are the /same/ color temperature, whatever that happens to be, but preferring "daylight" if you can.
Just these changes will MASSIVELY improve video quality on conferences, and for most people wouldn't even necessarily require buying anything additional except possibly light bulbs (you can makeshift a laptop stand, and move lamps from other rooms if it's an especially important meeting / interview you are preparing for).
For audio, nothing beats a microphone on a boom, but any good quality USB headset with a built-in boom microphone will get pretty close, so don't sweat this so much. The main thing is that you should NEVER be taking a call using the built-in speakers and microphone in your laptop... it sounds horrible and picks up a lot of noise.
The only laptops I would never use the camera on are Dell laptops that inexplicably chose to put the camera near the keyboard so it's staring up the person's nose the entire time.
My setup went through a lot of iterations over the lockdowns trying to build a high-quality setup in a small inner-city apartment; I'm almost happy now, but it's been quite a journey that I expected to be much easier and a lot less of a rabbit hole, but oh well at least I learned a ton. Also, why are webcams that bad? Given what low-tier phones can do with their back cameras, it's really weird just how freakishly bad webcam image quality still is on a lot of models.
As for some of my learnings:
Cameras: Using an external camera is important, looking downward into a laptop camera isn't very flattering to begin with, and it makes me uncomfortable. As with an ill-fitting suit, it makes me less confident. So I tried using my Fujifilm X-T4 with a HDMI capture device, since I already had that; a Logitech StreamCam, a Logitech C920 (or C922, not sure), a Razer Kiyo Pro and several cheap 720p webcams. The X-T4 wins in the image quality department (unsurprisingly) hands-down, but you have to run the audio through it as well or use a super low-latency capture device or else the image may lag just a small-but-perceivable bit and make the result feel pretty uncanny-valley-ish. It's a big hassle to set up before every meeting and leaving it on a free-standing tripod is an expensive accident waiting to happen. Would not recommend unless you must have the very best quality you can get (and have compatible microphones and good lights).
I've found the Logitech Streamcam to be pretty solid in terms of image quality. Don't count on Logitech's software if you're on a Mac, because part of the functionality is outright missing or broken, another part is availably only through a virtual webcam the software creates that won't work with most apps, and the whole thing will eat CPU like crazy, I've uninstalled it pretty quickly. Instead I use Webcam Settings [1], which can set the most basic parameters (exposure, focus, pan/tilt/digital zoom, backlight comp, anti-flicker, white balance) directly on the camera, which works a lot better. I digitally zoom it on my head a bit as it's quite wide, and that doesn't seem to hurt the image quality meaningfully as far as Slack/Zoom/Teams calls are concerned (might be different if you stream to Youtube at full res, but I never do). All StreamCams I received mid-2020 had focus issues, but these can be fixed relatively easily by cracking them open and changing the pre-set focus manually (voiding the warranty of course), and they seem to have fixed their QC since anyway, so getting one of these should be a pretty safe bet.
The Razer Kiyo Pro is great as well, with a very nice image, but it's even wider, and last I checked there was no macOS software at all. It still works well on macOS, though, you just can't use anything that requires Razer software, but it's compatible with Webcam Settings, so I'm fine. Using it on the living room TV nowadays for calls with friends and family and it works really well in that function as it's really wide-angle, so I could imagine it would work well for small meeting rooms. It's pretty big (too big for my desk setup, actually) and the microphone isn't great (you definitely need an external one no matter what), but its image quality is really great, considering it's a webcam. Very good low-light performance as well, great colors, looks more like an actual digital camera than a generic webcam.
I didn't like the Logitech C92x I tried at all. Grainy, bad low light performance (not that important as I have lighting, but still), slow to react to lighting changes, ugly, washed-out colors even when lit properly, I sent that one back right away. It was from Amazon so it might have been a fake, and there seem to be several models that are near-identical but differ greatly in image quality, so your mileage may vary.
Next, lights. People are having quite a lot of success with ring lights, but I have my desk against a wall with shelves, so placing...
I got an Avaya Huddle Cam, like the kind in many large enterprise conference rooms for $200 off amazon, its plug and play and has all sorts of zoom and pan features, HDMI output, stereo microphones and is 4K and because its Avaya, and regular folks dont seem to know about them, they're not really more overpriced then normal because of the pandemic or shipping. Also got a $35 Monoprice branded usb microphone does quite admirably. My co-workers have complimented me that it sounds very clear. The best part is that they are all plug and play and work on Linux/Windows/Mac with no additional downloads or drivers.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadThis made me wonder, apearantly I (I would say we, but you did not) can hear the distance something is recorded at, separately from the volume. How cool are our ears.
What's surprising to me is how good the laptop mic is, despite the hurdles working against it.
Rather than microphone quality, the differences between the samples are primarily attributable to microphone position and technique: specifically, being 10 cm from the mic produces something people like better than being 60 cm away. The main issue with the MacBook mic is that it's inconvenient to get close to it.
The advice to get a boom to make it easier to bring an outboard mic into optimal position without strain is excellent and highly practical, IMO.
The one big quality outlier is the Airpod Max sample, which exhibits compression artifacts and rolled off high end (and low end, but that matters less). It is substantially worse than all the other options. (It probably has worse latency, too.)
The iPad Pro sample isn't great either, probably because the mic is off-axis when speaking into it from a natural position. Again, the degradation is primarily a result of suboptimal microphone position and technique rather than component quality.
It's really frustrating, I also cared to set up a decent input, but all of Google Meet, Slack, and Zoom have terrible terrible compression.
Of course lighting is also really important as many cheap cams have sensors too small to do 30fps in low light. Let alone 60 which I think no current video conferencing product does.
Of course, if the author gets the North American salary instead of the European one, while living in Paris, then things might work out financially.
I moved in the deep suburbs of Paris because rent and apartment prices are a no go for a single income person, even in tech.
And as someone who never moved away from where he was born and also never lived in the really expensive part of the city, it might solve the problem of many more people just moving here to work, whereas they would prefer living more remotely. I would love to stay here, for example, not just because of work because I've lived here all my life and like it.
Also your (and the author's) mention of a studio confused me for quite a bit, we'd never call anything 30m2 a studio where I live :P
> And as someone who never moved away from where he was born and also never lived in the really expensive part of the city, it might solve the problem of many more people just moving here to work, whereas they would prefer living more remotely. I would love to stay here, for example, not just because of work because I've lived here all my life and like it.
I lived in rural land before moving in the Paris suburbs in order to land a job. In some ways I am glad I had to. It opened me to so many new stuff. I would not imagine enjoying my twenties in rural land personally. The trade of housing space for commodities, almost car free living and infrastructure is currently worth it for me. Maybe I will go back rural in my 30's now that full remote is gaining traction. Or maybe not. I get your point though.
> Also your (and the author's) mention of a studio confused me for quite a bit, we'd never call anything 30m2 a studio where I live :P
The nomenclature we use in France (IIRC) is studio for a single room, and then 1 bedroom, 2 bedroom, etc.. no matter the floor size. How would you call it? And where do you live so we have context in naming things? :)
I think you’re mixing two points I’m making. None of the point about offices in city centers and expensive neighborhoods relates to my personal experience. It was a general point about the futility of office-obsession on the part of companies, which was particularly bad even for startups in the Paris area back in 2015/2017. Hopefully it’s better now. But I remember people looking at me like I was mad for saying remote was non-negotiable.
May I ask the reason of work was not the one? I know I would not want to go back in the country side for now, given the limited public transportation and medical infrastructure out there.
> I think you’re mixing two points I’m making. None of the point about offices in city centers and expensive neighborhoods relates to my personal experience. It was a general point about the futility of office-obsession on the part of companies, which was particularly bad even for startups in the Paris area back in 2015/2017. Hopefully it’s better now. But I remember people looking at me like I was mad for saying remote was non-negotiable.
Sorry if I misread or interpreted things too quickly. From what I am witnessing in the area, you currently can :
1 - Go full remote in the country side and have your pay reduced. Job security takes a hit too, because the job market is not "hot" like in the US. 2 - Agree to come to the office 2/3 times a week and go live in the suburbs (or stay in town if you can afford it and enjoy it)
I currently using option 2. Maybe I am missing g other options.
> The strange video you see at the top of this post was filmed with this setup. One that I actively recommended against to any fellow remoter. Particularly folks who aren’t into photography or videography. It’s cumbersome, complex, and requires constant fidgeting to keep the camera on, obtain a consistent color temperature, or prevent automatic focus hunting due to shallow depth of field.
This is a common theme among people with overly complicated setups: Looks and sounds great when it works, but they're fighting with their setup in every other meeting: Focus issues, automatic power off problems, photographic cameras overheating because they weren't designed for long streams, audio issues as they work to select the microphone they want instead of something else, and so on.
This page recommends two excellent webcam-style USB cameras that won't deliver the professional-looking blurred background images, but they will just work when you plug them in and they won't be full of surprises. That's more valuable than a blurred background or crisp 4K video through expensive lenses when you're just a small H.265 compressed square on someone's screen.
They do, but you can't do video longer than (insert minutes) because otherwise it would be a video camera.
https://www.borrowlenses.com/blog/video-recording-limits-in-...
Initially, I've set up my DSLR, through purchased copy of SparkoCam. Continuous video ring light, green screen behind me, nice zoom for proper proportions of face and nice replaced background.
Insert months of tripping over cables, tripod, camera, green screen; dropping video because something on complex chain gave up; the laptop fan running like a jet airliner; and just general pain-in-the-kiester of it all. Now I have a logitech Brio in front of me. Nowhere near as nice, but more than good enough... and I haven't thought of it since I installed it :)
(I still have a small ring light, because lighting is important as the article indicates, for clarity of facial emotions and context )
The reason I suggest not starting with an SM7B is because this microphone is expensive at nearly $400, and requires high quality mic preamps to get a proper signal out of the mic (often people add a $150 cloudlifter) which adds to the expense.
The SM57 on the other hand is an excellent XLR dynamic microphone, used on countless recordings and live sound applications. It is super durable, and can be purchased used at around $50.
Plus Shure makes an optional $20 foam windscreen for the SM57 called the "A2WS" which helps filter out pops and plosives, and makes the mic look similar to a 7b.
There are many comparisons available on youtube to see if you can hear a $350 difference yourself, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFba93OLLig
I'd avoid the super cheap Behringers, M-Audios, and the like. These will typically be noisy and have essentially no resale value in the future, while quality brands hold most of their value and can be re-sold later if/when upgrading.
My use case is remote guitar lessons. I need an instrument in and a microphone in. My Microphone is the Audio Technica ATR2100 I bought a few years back.
After doing a lot of research, I bought the behringer with the agreement that if I use it enough and it’s a limiting factor on what I’m doing, I will upgrade to the UA Volt II when it actually is on sale and not just pre-order. But the limiting factor in my signal chain is the compression on Skype… so I just went with a cheapie interface it gets the job done. There is some noise I pick up when monitoring with Sony MDR-V6’s and I need the volume up pretty high to get good direct monitoring levels, but overall testing has gone well.
Again, if I had a more important use case or I was recording, I’d spend for the focusrite or just wait for the UA Volt II. But this is “Streets Ahead” of just using a laptop mic with my electric guitar unplugged (or to my headphones) because my kid is sleeping. The other option I had was just to swap between microphone and guitar, but that made lessons awkward.
It's a different approach, and has more buttons/knobs, but provides a high quality and free solution supporting rooms and multiple participants. Can be incorporated into OBS as well for recording, streaming etc.
I've found it to be a useful tool for connecting with musicians remotely.
The A6000 is among the most reasonably priced and dependable mirrorless cameras that you can use but it’ll still set you back around $1000 new and you’ll need a lens, and an acquisition card (Elgato Cam Link), etc. This is why my post recommends against mirrorless cameras for a huge majority of even tech-savvy folks.
Specifically because A/V tech savviness and computer tech savviness are far from wide overlaps in expertise.
My idea is that I could also plug the mic directly into the camera. I like how the A6000 looks and I only need it for recording so I wonder if there’s some slightly cheaper mirrorless that can produce similar quality.
2. Also the bandwidth of our video conferencing service (eg. Zoom)?
There's been a vacuum in high quality web cameras for a while, most of the market has just been junk.
A good microphone is totally worth it too. I'm not sure why after over a year of pandemic and remote work many are still using their 720p webcam in a dark (sometimes backlit) room with the crappy built-in mic. If you're making good money invest in a decent set up - with mostly remote comms, it matters more than you think.
In my case, I live in a one room Studio Loft with my wife, who is in meetings all day and is quite a loud speaker. Pretty much any boom/desktop Mic I've tried is also really good at picking her up.
My current workaround is to use a unidirectional headset microphone[1], But would love other ideas, as cable management is a bit cumbersome.
[1]https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D49N8C4
The SM7B seems to be listed as Cardoid not Supercardoid?
Get the mic close, disable auto mic level in zoom, and set the gain on the mic to be loud enough only while youre speaking.
[https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/MV7K--shure-mv7-usb-...]
It's a bit better than my AT2020. But I find that in order to get my Gain down low enough so that my partner isn't too distracting, I have to be right on the Mic.
Which isn't a very attractive look over video....
The pickup pattern is going to be mostly right in front of the mic, with the best rejection from the rear. Keep in mind the mic will also pick up reflections if there is a wall close behind you.
So ideally you’d sit in front of the mic with no wall or a wall at an oblique angle behind you, and your wife across the room directly behind the mic.
Turns out we're moving to a new home, so I anticipate this issue will get solved with walls and doors in the future.
And generally every single mic recommendation I give in the linked post has a cardioid pickup pattern which is precisely what can help isolate stray noise in places with louder environments. Software like Zoom will do the rest of the work for you depending on how aggressive the noise control settings are. Zoom is surprisingly good at eliminating echo, feedback, and other non-speaker-voice noises from the mic signal.
Stray far and wide from omnidirectional pickup patterns in microphones because they will unfortunately be far too sensitive to environmental noise. This is also true with many noise-canceled mic/earbuds combos which cancel noise for the person wearing it but not for the people receiving the mic audio recorded in the noisy space.
Do these three simple things to make your video better:
1. Get a laptop stand that raises your laptop so your eye level is towards the center of the screen. Not only does this improve ergonomics, it improves the positioning of the camera for video.
2. Get a lamp that you can move the head on and point it at the wall behind the laptop (assuming it's white-ish in color) to provide reflected back light at your face from behind the camera, and then add as much ambient light as possible in the room emanating from the corners (smaller rooms are easier to light). You don't need anything fancy, although yes a ring-light is probably "better" you can get by with cheap floor lamps from Walmart and some "daylight" color temperature bulbs.
3. Make sure all the lightbulbs in the room are the /same/ color temperature, whatever that happens to be, but preferring "daylight" if you can.
Just these changes will MASSIVELY improve video quality on conferences, and for most people wouldn't even necessarily require buying anything additional except possibly light bulbs (you can makeshift a laptop stand, and move lamps from other rooms if it's an especially important meeting / interview you are preparing for).
For audio, nothing beats a microphone on a boom, but any good quality USB headset with a built-in boom microphone will get pretty close, so don't sweat this so much. The main thing is that you should NEVER be taking a call using the built-in speakers and microphone in your laptop... it sounds horrible and picks up a lot of noise.
The only laptops I would never use the camera on are Dell laptops that inexplicably chose to put the camera near the keyboard so it's staring up the person's nose the entire time.
As for some of my learnings:
Cameras: Using an external camera is important, looking downward into a laptop camera isn't very flattering to begin with, and it makes me uncomfortable. As with an ill-fitting suit, it makes me less confident. So I tried using my Fujifilm X-T4 with a HDMI capture device, since I already had that; a Logitech StreamCam, a Logitech C920 (or C922, not sure), a Razer Kiyo Pro and several cheap 720p webcams. The X-T4 wins in the image quality department (unsurprisingly) hands-down, but you have to run the audio through it as well or use a super low-latency capture device or else the image may lag just a small-but-perceivable bit and make the result feel pretty uncanny-valley-ish. It's a big hassle to set up before every meeting and leaving it on a free-standing tripod is an expensive accident waiting to happen. Would not recommend unless you must have the very best quality you can get (and have compatible microphones and good lights).
I've found the Logitech Streamcam to be pretty solid in terms of image quality. Don't count on Logitech's software if you're on a Mac, because part of the functionality is outright missing or broken, another part is availably only through a virtual webcam the software creates that won't work with most apps, and the whole thing will eat CPU like crazy, I've uninstalled it pretty quickly. Instead I use Webcam Settings [1], which can set the most basic parameters (exposure, focus, pan/tilt/digital zoom, backlight comp, anti-flicker, white balance) directly on the camera, which works a lot better. I digitally zoom it on my head a bit as it's quite wide, and that doesn't seem to hurt the image quality meaningfully as far as Slack/Zoom/Teams calls are concerned (might be different if you stream to Youtube at full res, but I never do). All StreamCams I received mid-2020 had focus issues, but these can be fixed relatively easily by cracking them open and changing the pre-set focus manually (voiding the warranty of course), and they seem to have fixed their QC since anyway, so getting one of these should be a pretty safe bet.
The Razer Kiyo Pro is great as well, with a very nice image, but it's even wider, and last I checked there was no macOS software at all. It still works well on macOS, though, you just can't use anything that requires Razer software, but it's compatible with Webcam Settings, so I'm fine. Using it on the living room TV nowadays for calls with friends and family and it works really well in that function as it's really wide-angle, so I could imagine it would work well for small meeting rooms. It's pretty big (too big for my desk setup, actually) and the microphone isn't great (you definitely need an external one no matter what), but its image quality is really great, considering it's a webcam. Very good low-light performance as well, great colors, looks more like an actual digital camera than a generic webcam.
I didn't like the Logitech C92x I tried at all. Grainy, bad low light performance (not that important as I have lighting, but still), slow to react to lighting changes, ugly, washed-out colors even when lit properly, I sent that one back right away. It was from Amazon so it might have been a fake, and there seem to be several models that are near-identical but differ greatly in image quality, so your mileage may vary.
Next, lights. People are having quite a lot of success with ring lights, but I have my desk against a wall with shelves, so placing...
Does someone know why this matters?
None of his samples show him with headphones, so what are they used for?
The camera quality is good (a little short but can be put on a riser), the audio quality is good. The noise cancellation is good.