I have a fancy mic that I keep close to my face, but you still pick up some noise in an untreated room, so some sort of noise gate is important. (I personally use Krisp, which works pretty well. You hate to use a subscription service for something that could be done in hardware, but it's a lot of months of $5/month before you break even, and software doesn't take up valuable desk space with knobs that you never turn.)

To me, built-in echo cancellation tuned for people that do video calls with speakers / laptop mic is the worst thing. It tends to mute your audio for the first few seconds of your "turn". That means if you are just saying "yeah" and nodding, an important component of how humans interact, you disrupt the meeting for 5 seconds instead of adding some social smoothness. Use headphones and turn that off, and everything is a lot better. (If you use Zoom with a good audio setup, you have to turn on "original audio" and then turn off echo cancelation, and make sure you aren't echoing.)

But yeah, with any sort of sampling task, you want to increase the signal to noise ratio. The best way to do that with a microphone is to have it close to your mouth. A $4000 microphone on your desk is going to sound worse than a $70 microphone close to your mouth. That's just physics. Building a microphone into your keyboard is basically the worst thing you can do.

I have three headsets. One is a top recommended Bluetooth mono earpiece that cost ~$100 or so, one is a fancy ‘office’ usb headset from a big name that cost (my employer at least) $200+ (But has the mics built in to the ear cups), and the third is a $10 old school analog headset. It looks dorky, and it isn’t the most comfortable thing ever, but I get the best video conferencing results with the $10 headset because it has a boom mic that brings the mic close to my mouth.

Oh absolutely; Boom makes ALL the difference. If it doesn't have a boom, it's a headset with microphone as afterthought which by definition is setup to get all the noises from everywhere. The big headphones with microphone in earpiece are particularly horrible - I've used it couple of times out of desperation and people could hear my baby or wife two rooms over more clearly than myself :-/

The Logitech H151 is $20CAD when on sale, and though it's a bit "crisp/sharp", sounds way better than the Beats And Boses and Apples and Samsungs and Sony non-boom microphones people try to repurpose :-(

Several years back a previous employer bought us all Jabra 65 headsets. Can be connected via bluetooth or a little USB dongle (which is probably just bluetooth).

Best noise cancelling mic I've ever used. Someone can be talking right next to me and nothing will go over the mic except my voice talking directly into the boom.

Down side is you have to have the boom directly in front of your mouth; not slightly below or above.

After iterating quite a bit, I settled on using open back HD650’s and attaching a ‘mod mic’. The wire management is actually easy. This feeds into a DAC / amp combo from Schitt, mines the Fulla Schitt gen 3. Never had a better audio setup, for music, conferences, and games. Swap in a comparable closed back pair of headphones if working in a shared space.

Considering a custom rolled tube amp too just for the fun of it....

Laptop microphones are obviously problematic, but boom mics have their own issues. None of my coworkers know how to position the microphone properly, so whenever one of them talks it's riddled with plosive whooshes of air whenever they make a "P" or "B" sound.

I think videoconferencing software should have a mandatory "preview room". Well not mandatory, but like

  [preview microphone/camera] [join meeting]

Sort of like a staging area to check if your laptop actually works with the projector before you are in front of people.

You mean like meet has?

I was thinking teams or webex or the software large organizations use. (I'd love it if people talking to the group using the laptop microphone in their tiled kitchen could hear how they sound)

Don't apologize. Quality hardware is an underrated boost to basically everything in life, as long as you can afford to buy it.

You know this, and I know this, but 99% of people who use video calling software will never know this, so the software vendors are playing the hand they are dealt and improving the parts that are under their control.

Proper headset and/or proper microphone training. A lot of people just don't know, or care.

Continuing on this tangent, my office bought headsets for all employees so we could remote work. Bought dozens of Sony WH-1000X M3, turns out the microphone is ridiculously bad on these.

I don't get it. They are wireless, noise-canceling headphones, not communication headsets. They are super expensive and I'm sure excellent for music/listening, but have no boom and are in no way meant to be used for serious/frequent calls. Heck, their tagline is "only music; nothing else". If THAT's not a hint, I don't know what is...

It's depressing to think that a $20 headset may have been a better investment than the $300 headphones :<

Being good as headphones does not necessarily make a headset bad as a microphone.

I have a set of Bluetooth Plantronics Backbeat PRO. There is no boom mic, but everyone I have talked to on cell phone with them has said they sound good. Even when I am out for a walk they filter out all the vehicle noise and wind.

Hmm; that's fascinating - I am skeptical only because I happen (no kidding:) to own it, and they are the example I used in another comment - people can hear me typing, my wife in another room, etc. When I'm outside, they multiplied the wind as it gets caught between the thick headband and my hair and then picked up by microphone :-/

(I also tend to speak too loud with them, as they block outside noise effectively, but that's a "user error" thing :)

I enjoy them as headphones - convenient, simple to pair, comfy - but they are specifically the reason why I pursued a boom headset and why I'll never go back :)

Without testing I cannot speak to our differing experience; I DO notice that some friends/colleagues of mine have a very very low threshold of what "sounds good" - if they can even remotely understand me, it's "Fine". They are also the ones who don't mind 30 people joining with laptop mic/speakers and the muffled/delayed/garbled sound that results... Others provide much more critical feedback (calling my 75 year old father is a great way to test a new headset :P )

Or, you may have found a button I haven't! :=>

I have the XM2 and the main issue is using the microphone on a laptop drops it to the “hands free” bluetooth profile where both the mic and audio out use a super low bandwidth codec that sounds awful.

When I disable the mic the audio quality goes way up as it switches back to a higher bandwidth codec. It’s super annoying.

I’m not sure how the apple airpods get around this, I think something to do with their custom chip.

AirPods also drop quality when the mic is in use!

I’ve found if you have the headset in noise cancelling mode it messes with the mic and makes it worse. They may have patched it but was bad enough I stopped using them too.

Depends, I have a very good boom mic plugged into a solid interface that has essentially no background hiss or noise.

The software noise cancelling like Krisp in Discord or this Nvidia software is really nice because it stops outside noises like dogs barking, keyboard keys, etc from coming through.

With Krisp enabled in discord I can eat chips with voice activation enabled and no one can tell, and no one can hear my dog bark occasionally even if I'm talking while it happens.

And don’t forget the bane of working from home in the suburbs: leaf blowers.

It seems at least once per day there is an active leaf blower in my neighborhood vicinity. Same goes for my colleagues.

Noise cancellation is great for, well, cancelling their noise.

The worst, especially where I live in the SW. Most of the trees are evergreen so there was no relief during the winter. My office window overlooks five neighbor yards and I have each one's lawn care schedule on my calendar.

Proper headset is the first step. Just by everybody having good headsets and small lag -> everybody wins.

But in some situations having the extra help is what makes the difference. For example: today my room is noisy because some neighbour is using a drilling machine. With those softwares, I'm helping everybody else in my meetings, even if my life is miserable right now.

Yes to everything you said. My employer gave all employees a webcam with a half decent microphone built it, made a huge difference.

Related, and it could just be me, it seems that those who call in from their phone have some of the worst sound quality. Could just be a small sample size though.

Yes, but most people use laptops and not desktops.

So there needs to be a good solution for them without a boom mic. But also, a boom mic with quality noise canceling (a lot sucks right now, kinda like the backgrounds) will still be useful.

I find dynamic mics the best. Their ability to pick up noise drops rapids as you move away from the mic.