hi everyone kevin here today i have another fun video for all of you we’re gonna listen to the best possible microphone for a microsoft teams meeting now we’ve all been doing this remote work thing for a long time now and i’m sure you’ll agree with me that you’re starting to feel some team’s fatigue a big reason for that is poor audio quality and it kind of makes sense when you think about it when you speak your voice is digitized it’s sent all the way across the internet and then it’s reproduced on the other end and throughout that whole process there’s a whole bunch of compression and it really just destroys the fidelity of your voice today we’re going to look at does the microphone make a difference and we’re going to test out a whole bunch of different microphones on the very low end we’re going to look at the microphone that comes with your computer so an integrated microphone and then on the very high end we’re going to look at a twelve hundred dollar hollywood microphone to see what type of impact that has now you might be wondering doesn’t microsoft teams have some settings that help you improve the audio quality and there is one setting if you go up to the top right hand corner and click on your profile picture then click on settings over on the left hand side click on devices if we go down just a little bit there’s an option for noise suppression this will remove any background sound here for example i’ll turn it off and let’s hear what it sounds like right now noise suppression is turned off next let’s turn noise suppression on and now noise suppression is turned on and that’s the only setting in microsoft teams that you can use to adjust the audio quality if you have background sound it works great at eliminating it but let’s say that maybe you’re in a quiet place and the audio still isn’t very good your next best option is to look at some different microphones and we’re gonna do that today for this test i have an acoustically treated room what that means is i have sound panels on the wall i also have a high ply rug so this should eliminate any reverb and echo also i’m going to be running teams on another laptop i’ll broadcast the audio out to that so we’ll be able to simulate what it sounds like for an audience member and the very first microphone in this test is your basic integrated microphone this is the microphone that comes with your computer maybe you have a laptop maybe you have a desktop so right now we’re listening to the microphone before it goes through microsoft teams and now we’re going to turn it on so you can hear the sound through microsoft teams this is as basic as you can get and i also think this is probably the worst sounding audio next up i have a pair of bose quiet comfort 2 headphones these are 300 headphones but they’re really optimized for listening not for speaking but they do have an integrated microphone in them right now you can hear the original audio quality now we’re gonna send it through microsoft teams and you can hear what it sounds like now at least in my opinion this sounds pretty similar to what we get from the integrated microphone on the laptop i don’t really think it’s that much better and especially if you’re presenting or you have a large audience i don’t think these are the best option either and this now brings us to our third microphone this is the rode nt usb mini microphone this retails for about 100 and there are some other similar products on the market for example you have the blue yeti at 130 dollars and you’re gonna get comparable sound quality right now you could hear the original sound quality and now i’m going to switch it over so it goes through microsoft teams right now you can hear the audio quality through microsoft teams and i don’t know about you but i think there’s already been a pretty dramatic improvement in sound you have a little bit more of those lower frequencies the voice sounds a little bit richer and it also just has a softer sound to it this now brings us to our fourth microphone and this is the rode nt usb microphone this one retails for 170 dollars right now you can hear the original sound quality before it goes into microsoft teams now let’s run it through microsoft teams right now you can hear what the audio sounds like and unfortunately it gets compressed a whole bunch but once again it feels like the overall audio quality for our audience continues to get better and this now brings us to the very last microphone and in my opinion the best microphone this is the sennheiser mkh 50. this is frequently used in tv commercials and also in movies if you’ve ever seen the dark knight you’ve already heard this microphone because this was used extensively in the indoor dialogue scenes right now you can hear the original sound quality and it sounds very good now i’m running the audio quality through microsoft teams so once again just like in all the other examples it’s been degraded a whole bunch but the original source i think was the best so it also turns out the best when it goes out to our audience so in my opinion this one is the best microphone of the bunch but once again it’s also a whopping twelve hundred dollars which is extremely pricey and now just for comparison purposes we’re going to listen to all of the microphones side by side testing testing one two three testing testing one two three testing testing one two three testing testing one two three testing testing one two three all right well that was the audio test did you hear a difference could you tell the difference between the most expensive microphone and the worst microphone now i know there’s a lot of compression that happens and none of them sound like the very best that they can be and of course it has to get sent across the internet now at least when i went back and i listened to all of them i personally thought that the sennheiser mkh-50 or the hollywood microphone was by far the best it sounds very very nice but it’s also 1200 which is a lot of money and i don’t think anyone’s gonna go out and spend that much money for the top of the line microphone from microsoft teams what’s interesting though is when you go from the integrated microphone that just comes with your laptop and you go up to the say 100 microphone with the rode nt usb mini you get a very drastic improvement in audio quality at least that’s what i thought when i listened to it so when you pay a little bit of money the quality improves pretty dramatically then with the rode nt-usb at 170 and the sennheiser at 1200 you do get some quality improvement you get a slight improvement but for that additional improvement it costs a lot of money and so in a sense it reminds me of one of my favorite phrases but it’s diminishing returns you pay more and more money for a slight improvement but the question is is that worth it i don’t know if it is i personally think the optimal point is probably about a hundred dollars a mid-tier microphone is relatively affordable and it’ll give you a massive improvement in your quality in microsoft teams especially if you’re a teacher or you work at some workplace where you’re presenting a lot it’ll lead to a much better experience for all of your attendees alright well that’s all i had for you today i hope you found this video interesting if you want any of these microphones that i talked about in this video i’ve included links to all of them in the description down below if you enjoyed this video please give it a thumbs up as always to see more videos like this make sure to hit the subscribe button also if you want to see me cover any other topics leave a note down below alright well that’s all i have for you today i hope you enjoyed and as always i hope to see you next time bye [Music]