Improving Sound for Meetings: Microphones and More

by | Mar 3, 2021 | Technology, Telework

Improving Sound for Meetings: Microphones and More

A skilled editor can salvage poorly recorded video using digital processing with overlaying photos, B-roll, or other visuals. However, even the best video is intolerable if its sound is awful. We’ve all seen these on YouTube. We close them quickly and search for something better. 

Good sound is crucial for online meetings, especially if we play a critical role and need to speak. As I say often, any barrier to communication gets in the way of our success. People mentally leave teleworking meetings more often than they physically disconnect.

I used what I learned from more than a decade of amateur video and professional podcast production when setting up my home office. My audio quality is good, and my space doubles as a podcasting studio. Except for a rare Internet connection issue, I don’t have problems with sound quality.

It Starts with a Good Microphone

When it comes to microphones, most of us use whatever came built into other technology. Many laptops, monitors, and webcams include built-in microphones. They are all horrible when compared to a good microphone dedicated to the purpose of recording sound.

Some people opt for headsets. These direct sound into our ears and position a small microphone in front of our mouth. They are a simple solution to the challenge of sound. If you’re in a hurry, they’re perfectly adequate for most meetings.

The rest of us want a better solution. Many of us don’t like cords or the way we look on camera with a headset. Wireless solutions have issues too. For us, there’s nothing quite like a high-quality, hard-wired microphone. Like most people I know, I use a Blue Yeti microphone. It connects to my computer using a USB cable, so it’s easy for non-engineers to use. It also features multiple pickup patterns that you can read about on the manufacturer’s site. Its competitive pricing and high quality have made it a popular choice among amateurs and professionals alike for the last decade.

You can find many other USB microphones with an Internet search. Any of these will likely beat microphones built into your other hardware. I’d love to hear your experiences with any of them. The Apogee MiC+, which leads many competitive reviews, is at the top of the list of microphones I’d love to try (among others).

Positioning and Mounting

A good microphone, placed directly in front of you on your desk on its factory stand, may still result in sound problems. The issue is primarily the distance between your voice and the microphone. Avoiding the physics of sound propagation and response curves, you want the microphone close to your mouth. This placement creates the highest input levels and best sound. Positioning is one advantage of using an external microphone.

A mounting solution is a boom arm. This boom might be spring-hinged and attached to a desk surface or a traditional floor-standing boom. Either solution allows you to position the microphone directly in front of your mouth. It can also be placed close for video considerations but still just out of the camera’s field of view. The floor-stand option provides a lot of flexibility and portability, but I find it gets in the way in my small office. The articulating arms can be easily moved around and repositioned but only work when I’m seated at my desk.

I use two different desk-mounted booms that I find equally good: The Blue Compass and the Thronmax S3 Zoom. Both feature cable management and internal springs for easy positioning and movement.  Both clamp to your desk or, for solid surfaces that you don’t mind damaging, can be bolted in place.

Bad Vibrations

Every keyboard or mouse click is picked up clearly by your microphone. Keyboard presses, finger taps, hand smacks, foot knocks, and more transfer to microphones as loud booming sounds. Any of these will overwhelm your voice. They’re enough to drive sound engineers crazy, not to mention those listening to what you’re saying in your meeting.

If your mic is in any way connected to your desk, even resting on it, you need to isolate it from vibrations. In a pinch, I’ve used several mousepads to isolate desktop microphones. That helps, but it’s much better to plan and buy a shock mount dedicated for this purpose. Even inexpensive options work surprisingly well.

Most shock mounts feature a ring that attaches to the microphone using a standard mounting screw. This ring connects to another (outer) ring using an elastic material that dampens vibrations. The outer ring then attaches to virtually any microphone mount, including booms. Some manufacturers offer podcasting kits that bundle a boom arm, shock mount, and microphone.

Save the Popping for Corn

Ideally, a microphone accurately responds to sound waves from your voice to produce a clean electrical signal. The signal is then digitized to produce audio used by sound recording software or online meeting apps.

However, when you speak certain consonants, your microphone will also respond to the explosion of air that emerges from your mouth. These sounds are called pops or plosives. They’re most noticeable for consonants such as P, B, T, or K. Try it for yourself. Place your hand directly in front of your mouth and say, “Pop.” The pulse of pressure you feel on your hand will just as abruptly move the pickup surface of the microphone.

The resulting output sounds like loud thumping. At best, the noises are annoying. At their worst, they can make your audio even less intolerable than a low-quality microphone.

Again, there are physical explanations and solutions. Both geometry and microphone placement can help. A more straightforward, convenient, and inexpensive solution is a pop filter. These are typically small, flat screens made from two or more layers of a porous fabric that you position between your mouth and the microphone. They diffuse your plosive air blasts, making them virtually disappear for those listening to you in meetings.

Conclusion

A good microphone, appropriately mounted, isolated from vibrations, and protected from plosives, can produce good sound. All can be yours for less than $300USD, but there are also bargains to be found.

There are other issues to address for good sound, primarily related to your physical workspace. We’ll save that for a future article.

In the meantime, happy teleworking—and thanks for reading!

~ @tomspiglanin

Am I Using VPN or a Virtual Desktop for Telework?

Am I Using VPN or a Virtual Desktop for Telework?

by | Oct 6, 2020 | Telework, Workplace

Am I Using VPN or a Virtual Desktop for Telework?

In this era of telework, many of us around the world are teleworking daily for the first time. Even if we are part-time telecommuters, remotely accessing the company intranet and our teleworking coworkers is now a daily practice.

Most companies enable telework in one of two ways: virtual private network (VPN) or a virtual desktop. Some companies offer one or the other, and some offer both. When I ask about which someone uses for telework, questions result. Most can be boiled down to one: what’s the difference?

This turned out to be more difficult than I had expected, so this post attempts to explain the difference from our working perspective. It’s not intended to be technically rigorous or to downplay the importance of security that protects company intranets around the world. So here is my nickel tour of the VPN versus virtual desktop.

Virtual Desktop

The virtual desktop is essentially a host computer on the company intranet that uses a client application on your personal device to display its graphical desktop. The data that creates the desktop, which would normally show on a connected monitor, is encrypted and sent across the Internet to our devices, which decrypt it and update our display. It also exchanges data with our human interfaces like mouse, keyboard, and printers, depending on our device and the client application’s capabilities.

Virtual desktops are often allocated from a pool as needed; they aren’t physical computers, they just act like them. However, they may also be a limited resource, so companies need to plan accordingly to meet telework needs. Necessary applications run on the host computer, not our devices, so we don’t own or maintain the applications. Also, the information we work with never transfers to our devices. Rather, they load into applications running on the virtual computer within the firewall and are saved back to the storage location they loaded from.

Pros: Large files such as audio, video, or images can load directly into applications on the virtual computer or transferred between workplace locations without taxing our own Internet connections. Also, virtual desktop client applications are widely available for a variety of personal devices you may want to use, including Windows, Macintosh, and other Unix computers, tablets, and smart mobile devices with no special configuration. There is no need to own or maintain the desktop software needed for work.

Cons: As an allocated resource, the desktop might “time-out” and be returned to the pool while away or working offline. This time-out might also be triggered if our Internet connection is interrupted for any reason, including router issues or the connection quality from our Internet service providers. Also, if an application requires lots of data transfer to update the client, as with video, it could strain the workplace Internet connection. In practice, video performance is often intentionally degraded to one update per second or less, which then means poor performance.

Virtual Private Network

With a virtual private network, a properly configured device connects to the Internet and, with the same kind of authentication that might be needed for a virtual desktop, becomes a part of the company intranet—along with all of its security requirements. Data are encrypted and sent across the company’s Internet connection to the device we’re using. All required applications must be installed on our devices to use them. Data files can then be stored locally on our device or sent back across the Internet to their original location.

To use a VPN connection from a device outside from the workplace, devices are typically configured by information technology specialists. Many companies provide pre-configured devices for this purpose, rather than configuring our personal devices to make them work. In many cases, such companies completely prohibit personal devices from connecting to their intranets.

Pros: Once connected, our device is fully a part of the internal network with access to other devices, printers, servers, and services, both outsourced and organic. Because the device is physically in our possession, we can configure settings as we would on our workstation in the office. The VPN also excels where large data files transfer infrequently, allowing us to save them and work on them locally. This includes working offline if our VPN or Internet connection is terminated for any reason. Non-standard software, those applications beyond the office suite installed by most companies, can also be installed; they really cannot with a virtual desktop. A final note from personal experience, I’ve noticed an advantage for VPN for workplace conferencing applications, notably audio and video conferencing. This may vary between companies and configurations.

Cons: For those of us with capable personal devices, company-provided devices often demand more of our attention and take up space in our teleworking environments. High data demands from multiple devices at the same time may also strain a company’s Internet connection in certain circumstances, noting this might also be the case for virtual desktops. Large data files can transfer no faster than the speed of the slowest connection in the chain, which is typically our own Internet connection.

What’s the Difference?

Perhaps the biggest difference in the user experience is illustrated below. The virtual desktop runs in an application on our personal computer or mobile device, allowing us to use other applications and switch between them at will. The VPN device is directly a part of the company network, so all applications run natively on that device and are subject to the intranet’s security rules (including the proxy authentication to access the Internet). One sure-fire way to test this difference is to run a speed test, freely available on the Internet. The VPN device will display a speed limited by the bandwidth of our own Internet connection. The virtual desktop will instead measure the data transfer speed of the workplace connection with the Internet, which typically has much higher bandwidth than our home connections.

Again, this is not intended to be a technically rigorous explanation of either the virtual desktop or the VPN, but to highlight the difference from a user perspective.

Please let me know if this was helpful, what might need to be clarified, and what’s wrong with this summary.

Thanks for reading!

Featured image created by freepik – www.freepik.com