Zoom microphone

Whenever I'm on a Zoom meeting I have to speak very loudly to be heard by other participants. I've got both a webcam with built in microphone and a stand alone, same with both. I've been into settings/sound/input volume and set it at 100%, but when I do a test speaking at normal volume it only goes up to ~15% on the webcam, 3% on the other. Anyone got any ideas? next door neighbours probably getting fed up of me shouting!

A lot of microphones have a gain control knob nowadays - sometimes not always obvious!

Zoom has various clever audio settings internally - worth a fiddle.

Lastly, what happens with other programs? When you record into something like Audacity, what do you get?

I have a built in laptop microphone that is very directional and you need to be in just the right place for it to work well. If there are two people it is hopeless for one of them or sometimes both. As a result I bought a USB microphone with a gain control on it and a cardoid detection area, so not directional. The microphone gain control on the microphone is turned up to full gain.

In Zoom settings I have the microphone volume close to full, turned off Automatically adjust microphone volume and Suppress background noise set to medium. This has cured the problems I was having with people letting me know that they could see me talking but could not hear me.

Martin C

Thanks for the replies. I've played with the Zoom microphone settings to no avail. Not tried Audacity, but someone has given me another webcam, which seems to work a bit better. No gain control knobs to be found anywhere on existing webcam or mic. Would a preamp help, or does the mic do the digitising. I'm plainly well out of my pay grade here! Stand alone mic connects to USB

Never even heard of Audacity, but it looks like just the thing for digitising audio tapes?

Anything that goes through USB will digitise on this side of the USB cable. I do use what is called an audio interface for recording instruments (mine is the cheap but adequate Behringer UM2) but any microphone sold for use with a computer shouldn't need such tricks.

I use Audacity a lot for all sorts of basic audio tasks - real sound engineers will turn up their noses at it, quite rightly, but as a glorified tape recorder replacement it's very good indeed. And crucially, it's handy for diagnosing hardware issues because you can look at the waveform and see how much signal is getting through, what the noise floor is doing, and so on.

For some reason Microsoft hide the solution really well. Loads of places to access different aspects of microphones, but this is what you want.

Type 'sound' in the search bar.

Choose sound settings

When this opens on the right choose 'sound control panel'

On the sound control panel, choose the recording tab.

Select your microphone and double click.

Now choose 'levels' - I have mine set for 100 on level and maximum boost (30dB).

This should make all the difference.

Neil

On the right of this choose

Ocenaudio is a recommended, simpler alternative.

Neil,

My version of windows must be different to yours, but I'd already found how to set the microphone level to 100%. I then found a way to the 'record' tab, chose set levels, and it was 100%. Still no joy from the plug in mic, I think it is kaput, but I'm going to investigate Calum's suggestion of Audacity, or Ega's Ocenaudio as I have several od trad jazz tapes I'd like to digitise. Mission Hall Jazz Band for one. I know, old man's music, but then I am ah old man!

Audacity suggested that the webcam mic was OK, so I had another go at Neil's suggestion and found another slider, well hidden, which was set at 56%. I changed that to 100%, and then found a site zoom.test, where you can have a meeting with yourself and test video and audio. It now seems OK, so thanks Calum and Neil. It appears the standalone is duff.

Yes, it's the 'boost slider' that is well hidden. Glad you got sorted.

N.