Tech Best microphone for zoom calls?

[Fedorgasm]

I work from home and take meetings over zoom and teams all day. I got sick of wearing a headset all day so I got this expensive Jabra speakerphone thing.

The problem is that I sound like I'm talking on a speakerphone. People can tell when I switch from my headset to the speaker phone. They say I sound far away, or like I'm in a subway.

But I was on a call with a guy that wasn't wearing a headset and he sounded amazing. I asked him what mic he used and he said he didn't know, but he got it from his son who's a gamer.

So I have come to you, my gaming sherbros, asking for your help in recommending a mic that works well for this. Something that won't echo, has good noise cancelling for background noise, and won't pick up feedback.

 

[avenue94]

I work from home and take meetings over zoom and teams all day. I got sick of wearing a headset all day so I got this expensive Jabra speakerphone thing.

The problem is that I sound like I'm talking on a speakerphone. People can tell when I switch from my headset to the speaker phone. They say I sound far away, or like I'm in a subway.

But I was on a call with a guy that wasn't wearing a headset and he sounded amazing. I asked him what mic he used and he said he didn't know, but he got it from his son who's a gamer.

So I have come to you, my gaming sherbros, asking for your help in recommending a mic that works well for this. Something that won't echo, has good noise cancelling for background noise, and won't pick up feedback.

Mine is a Blue Yeti, it works fine and isn't a terrible value if you grab it on sale. Honestly, a decent pair of earbuds with a mic is usually good enough for work. Most of the bad audio quality on work calls is due to distance from the microphone more than the mic's quality itself.

 

[KaNesDeath]

So I have come to you, my gaming sherbros, asking for your help in recommending a mic that works well for this. Something that won't echo, has good noise cancelling for background noise, and won't pick up feedback.

Elgato Wave 3, HyperX Quadcast S and Sennheiser Profile USB microphone are all adequate desktop microphones.

Terms of achieving the best audio from microphones. Youll need a microphone arm with a pop filter.

 

[Stoic1]

Shure

 

[Madmick]

I work from home and take meetings over zoom and teams all day. I got sick of wearing a headset all day so I got this expensive Jabra speakerphone thing.

The problem is that I sound like I'm talking on a speakerphone. People can tell when I switch from my headset to the speaker phone. They say I sound far away, or like I'm in a subway.

But I was on a call with a guy that wasn't wearing a headset and he sounded amazing. I asked him what mic he used and he said he didn't know, but he got it from his son who's a gamer.

So I have come to you, my gaming sherbros, asking for your help in recommending a mic that works well for this. Something that won't echo, has good noise cancelling for background noise, and won't pick up feedback.

You don't need an expensive mic to sound loud and clear.

The Blue Yeti recommended to you is the more expensive mic made by a company that dominated this for many years with two models. This was Blue, which Logitech purchased in 2018, and the two models were the Blue Snowball and the Blue Yeti. Logitech killed off the brand in 2023, but they maintain the namesakes of the product lines if you go to their company page for mics: with many variants of the Yeti, and the successor to the Snowball in the Snowball iCE. The Snowball is more than sufficient for your needs, or any gamer. The Yeti is good enough for a streamer setup.

Since then, a Chinese rival arose and organized itself to compete: Tonor. It unseated the Snowball atop the bestseller list for all mics by undercutting them with equivalent performance at a much lower price. The Snowball was originally $50. Tonor came in with the TC-777 and the TC-30. Each would hover around $35-$40. You can see the TC-777 is now $32 at Amazon.

Plenty of worthwhile competitors, like HyperX, the California company that made the HyperX Cloud headphones that long dominated the bestseller list of gaming headsets.I owned them, and ran them into the ground. They were fantastic. IIRC, those were Swedish-manufactured, by QPAD. I don't know who makes their mics, but HP had already acquired HyperX via their subsidiary Kingston, so HP's ownership didn't interfere in quality control.

The point is you don't need to spend more. In my experience, by far the most important link in the chain regarding sound quality is the audio software being used. Krisp, the audio technology Discord uses, just shits on everything for noise cancellation. Utterly shits on everyone. Zoom was pretty mid the last time I used it, but I think you should be good with a $35 class mic.