As you may remember, I have started using the video conferencing app ‘Zoom’this year on my iPad. I had some problems some while back with garbling / corruption of the audio/video streams in Zoom or Zoom dropping the application-layer protocol altogether and then requiring me to restart the link. These problems have largely gone away now I have got rid of two bad copper lines and replaced one of them with a good new line (so one fewer in total, three links in total not four as back in March).
So leaving internet connection quality issues aside completely, I’m still having some difficulties using Zoom because I can’t hear the fricatives/sibilants in speech very well; the higher speech frequencies ~ 4-5kHz. It may well be that the other person, my teacher in Zoom evening classes, has a rubbish microphone perhaps? But that isn’t something I can fix apart from using my powers of persuasion and in such a case I need to check whether or not I am the only one affected or else everyone in the class is not hearing the teacher’s fricatives and sibilants clearly. When you are listening to your native language, your brain can compensate for poor sound quality by using intelligent guesswork, but when listening to a foreign language you are stuffed if audio is poor.
It could also be my iPad’s speakers that are rubbish, or my headphones, or Zoom’s audio processing algorithms; Zoom will presumably have a compression algorithm? Or is the bit rate for speech-quality audio so low that there’s no need? I would thing Zoom has to have sophisticated echo-cancelling algorithms which can handle long delays and I wonder how much all these algorithms muck up high frequencies?
Suggestions for decent microphones and high quality headphones on a budget (asking for the impossible there, maybe, but this is ‘high quality’ in the context of speech only, so not hifi at all). Are just about to have to pay for the house roof being repaired after fifteen years of intense crazy gales and pouring rain, so my financial director is vetoing frivolous spending just now.
That’s the killer though; I realise that I can’t alter my teachers’ hardware, not unless there happens to be a lot of us students affected. it perhaps I could get some cheap but better headphones.
