Better audio quality

Disclaimer: I'm not a sound engineer and haven't done anything audio-quality related.

I used to work mostly remotely and complained about audio quality a lot. It's always acknowledged that it's important for collaborating remotely but never quite actually changed — if anything, it got worse after coming out of the pandemic. Audio quality is the biggest factor that tanks meeting quality for me, so I'm going to whinge about it.

In lounge and meeting-room settings, input that's not an actual microphone close to the person speaking is generally terrible. There are obviously a lot of factors at play, such as baseline background noise; as whether or not an area is treated; software noise cancellation; type and quality of equipment; etc. But based on personal experience, at least in terms of audio, you're better off buying the latest entry-level MacBook Air + cheap microphone, which probably costs about as much and potentially has lower energy consumption, than one of those conferencing bar thingy: they cost about as much but you get substantially better sound quality.

There may be slightly more wires involved depending on how you set it up, but that's not even a problem these days if budget isn't super tight because you can go Bluetooth. You could complain about that setup being slightly more fiddly than a TV connected to a conferencing bar thing that are both always on — chances are you don't want to actually change anything for anyone but yourself if you can't even accommodate a small habitual change anyway.

If you care about audio in meetings for your employees, it actually costs as little as ~$50 to test out a microphone for small meeting rooms. There are lots of options: even those affordable omnidirectional meeting microphones that sit on a desk work better than one of my previous colleagues tried worked better than those ridiculous conference bars or ceiling "microphones". Heck, you can get decent dual microphones for ~$100 these days for larger meeting rooms, which is just a fraction of the cost of one of those, cough, throwable microphone cubes at the time of writing.

For everyone else often in their own, isolated environment: invest (or get work to invest) in a good ~$50 microphone if you have meetings remotely a lot. And, regardless, find someone to test the audio quality of the inputs you have available to you, such as headphones with microphone attachment; headphones; earbuds; and your laptop's microphone (they're quite good on MacBooks). Once you have which audio input is the best that you have, make an effort to use that audio input in meetings.

What prompted this: I was guilty of not having done this sooner even though it annoyed me a lot. People could hear me well enough, including those I worked closely with and trust a lot, but I never bothered getting an actual microphone even though I'd wanted to. I have now gotten one and tested it with a few people: it has substantially better quality over anything that isn't a microphone or my MacBook.

So... consider getting a microphone to make life better for those around you!