How to get great sound when working from home (or in any small office)
When working from home,
these are the key elements to making your phone calls, online calls and online meetings sound good….
Microphone location
Backgound noise
Room sound
Equipment setup
Microphone location - The mic. should be quite close to your mouth. This makes what you say louder than other sounds. In other words, background noise and echo from the room are quieter compared to your own speech. You should hear the benefits of this in your own headphones but the listener(s) at the other end will certainly benefit. Keeping the mic. close can be as simple as using a headset with inbuilt mic, a lavalier(lapel) mic or a mic on a stand. Mics inbuilt into webcams and laptops aren’t good for this because they are further from your mouth.
2. Background noise - any sound that isn’t part of the conversation is effectively noise. Noise will detract from the quality of the call or meeting. The simple actions to reduce background noise are things like making sure windows and doors are shut, appliances like TVs, stereos and dryers that are nearby are not running, other people are made aware that you need them to be quiet. Less easily fixed are the structural issues like poorly soundproofed walls, ceilings etc.
3. Room sound - Echoes in the room are a form of noise. They cause interference when what you said a syllable or two ago reappears at the microphone from a reflection elsewhere in the room. This just confuses or garbles the speech. Sometimes it may even have a characteristic sound that is dependent on the room geometry. It may make you sound like you are in a tunnel, like you are booming or like you have a cold. The simple solution is to have plenty of acoustically absorbent materials like mattresses, cushions etc in the room. Ideally, proper acoustic panels like these are best because they absorb the full speech range meaning the echoes are gone, along with any characteristic sound.
4. Equipment setup - Whether it’s a mobile phone or an online meeting, you need to hear some of your own voice played to you in your headphones while you are talking. Otherwise it feels very unnatural (in fact even old landline phones did this) and it is commonly called “side tone”. In online calls, this can accidentally be mixed up with the sound coming from the other participants or sent to them wrongly. So there are settings in the various applications to stop echo from happening in the call. You need to refer to the instructions for the application you are using and usually searching for “echo” will lead to the appropriate settings.