Strange quality on recording from USB mic

[Pezzatronic]

Hi,
This was a remote recording with a Zoom call.
Remote contributer using a win10 laptop.
Rode USB mic
Audacity input selected as USB mic. Mono.
Recording was fine up until a wifi issue forced us to stop and restart. After the restart, via Zoom screenshare, I checked the input to Audacity was still shown as the usb mic and it was. All looked good.
When I got the recorded audio back, after the breakdown it sounds like it's coming out of an iphone speaker and is unusable.
I'm puzzled as the mic sounded consistent the whole time on Zoom and, as I say, the Audacity input selection hadn't changed.
Any ideas?
Cheers
Pez

[kozikowski]

the Audacity input selection hadn't changed.
Any ideas?

Sure. Zoom, Skype and the others get their good stability by taking over your computer sound services and configure them as needed. What you want doesn't matter. So when the Zoom session came back up, it determined that it needed to connect a different way.

Recording was fine up until a wifi issue forced us to stop and restart.

I don't think I would read it that way. I would say your recording was interfering with Zoom and it caused a restart to get rid of it. The software is vicious. You usually can't record this stuff by a simple button push or easy configuration change.

Koz

[Pezzatronic]

Interesting. Would you suggest that Audacity is the wrong software to do this?
Because I'm working with remote contributors who I can't assume are technical, I need something really simple that can make local WAV recordings of just their USB mics while Zoom is running.

[steve]

By far the easiest way to record a Zoom meeting is to use Zoom's built-in "record" feature.
If you need better quality, it becomes a lot more complicated.

[Pezzatronic]

Yeah, we did use the Zoom recorder too. But obviously that's Zoom quality. This is a scenario where we would have used a studio if we could, so we are trying to get a solution which sounds nearly as good. And prior to this glitch, it did.

[steve]

we are trying to get a solution which sounds nearly as good. And prior to this glitch, it did.

How was the remote person recorded? Was that just your microphone picking up from your computer speakers?

[kozikowski]

But obviously that's Zoom quality.

There may be a half-way mark. Is everybody wearing headphones? If everybody sits at their desk drinking coffee, leans back in their chair, listens to the laptop and talks in its general direction (maximum convenience factor) in a modern, wooden-floor room, that means Zoom has to do the most work with noise reduction, echo cancellation, feedback detection and direction management. That's what gives you the silvery, wine-glass, cellphone voice.

If you're wearing headphones, about half of that goes away and if you're both wearing headphones, direction management also goes away. The connection becomes a better quality, 100% bi-directional link. No switching or muting.

Your wired headphones should be the best quality you can manage. Big, fluffy and sealed on the head are best. Wired earbuds work. Wireless earbuds, the most popular but bringing up the rear. Wireless anything can have problems with delay and the ever popular running out of battery.

We note that fashionable wooden floors, plain white walls, and military-grade minimalism showed up at the worst possible time for conferencing and voice recording. Give me a nice overloaded and dead-quiet Victorian parlor.

You can also experiment with each person wearing headphones and recording their own voice on their smartphone. iPhone Voice Memo and laying the phone down on a table between us is how I shot this. Total technical setup, almost zero.

Interview-Cafe-SampleClip.mp3

(519.18 KiB) Downloaded 3 times

Without the headphones that stops working because the smartphone would pick up everything in both directions.

KCET/KPCC Reporter Roundup in Los Angeles is an odd case. Apparently, nobody in a six-way is wearing headphones or taking any special effort, and yet they sound pretty good. You get instability when they all try to talk at the same time. Juan should not ask them how they're all doing at the front of the show.

I need to find out how they're doing it. I see one of them has a "real" microphone almost out of sight in one corner of the video frame. It's possible the stations gave everybody nice, directional microphones instead of struggling with the tiny laptop thing just left of the shift key.

Koz

[kozikowski]

WiredEarbuds.jpg (86.17 KiB) Viewed 123 times

It doesn't have to be nuts. This reporter is using wired earbuds. He has no echo errors.

Koz

[kozikowski]

Is it a video call? Everybody automatically assumes two or more Zoom frames on the screen with the participants.

Koz

[kozikowski]

There is the "Everybody Knows" factor. Everybody on earth is getting accustomed to Cellphone Voice on news or participation shows. That's just the way it is.

Koz