Internet and zoom

Username03725

Hi Annie. If others report that your sound fluctuates and fades in & out, it might be your physical position. I see it a lot on our video calls, where people assume that the mic works the same as our ears. It doesn't and if you have a mic that's sensitive to direction and you tend to move to turn your head away when speaking the result could well be fading. One of our guys does it and as soon as he turns his head slightly away as you would in normal speech, the audio level falls off a cliff and we can't hear him.

Try positioning yourself over the laptop, and maintain that position. And altho it's an obvious point, speak clearly and with enough natural volume in your voice. Too many people don't.

HTH.

Jenni_D

The above in radio presenter parlance is known as "going off mic" ... Ricky Wilson (from the Kaiser Chiefs) was bad for doing this when he had a show on Radio X.

Annie1960

Username03725 said:

Hi Annie. If others report that your sound fluctuates and fades in & out, it might be your physical position. I see it a lot on our video calls, where people assume that the mic works the same as our ears. It doesn't and if you have a mic that's sensitive to direction and you tend to move to turn your head away when speaking the result could well be fading. One of our guys does it and as soon as he turns his head slightly away as you would in normal speech, the audio level falls off a cliff and we can't hear him.

Try positioning yourself over the laptop, and maintain that position. And altho it's an obvious point, speak clearly and with enough natural volume in your voice. Too many people don't.

HTH.

I don't think I move very much as I'm not a fidgety person, and am reading out information from a fixed position. This does not happen with the external mic. 

When I tried recording myself on a zoom meeting with only myself there, the sound faded in and out and I was not moving.

Anyway, the solution seems to be to use an external mic.

Annie1960

I've just found a solution to the problem of the internal mic fading - I followed the advice about the settings in this YouTube video, and it now seems to be fixed.

So I can use either the external mic or the internal mic now. Here is the link in case anyone else has a similar problem - it's for Windows 10.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkFjoruplnc