I recently started working from home full-time and I am facing a few new challenges. One of the biggest challenges is communicating well with my team members. Since I just started last week, I am still getting used to everyone; their styles, personalities, and sense of humor in the chat room. We use Campfire for work-related discussion; I am expected to be in the “Development” chat room when I am working. We also use Skype for casual talking and group conference calls. Occasionally we use iChat for screen sharing and audio chat. In order to communicate effectively with these technologies you need to have a good headset with a microphone. We all use MacBook’s and they have wonderful built-in audio hardware (and a video camera), but the microphone on the MacBook Pro’s is placed too close to the speaker. This causes annoying feedback when using audio conferencing through the computer.
I fortunately bought a Logitech ClearChat Pro USB not too long ago. This headset is amazing (for the price: $50). It uses a single USB connection, which powers the headset, and provides a dedicated audio interface. It doesn’t require any drivers (on the Mac). It has an extra long cord. It’s very comfortable and has convenient mute and volume buttons on the earpiece. The sound performance for listening to music is also great. This gadget (or something similar) is mandatory when using online audio conferencing applications on a daily basis. I strongly recommend that everyone on my team get one of these!
If you don’t want to buy a headset, you can try these other tricks to reduce feedback:
- Turn down the volume.
- Plug in external speakers and point them in the opposite direction of the microphone.
- Plug in normal audio (iPod) headphones and use the built-in microphone of your laptop.
- Get a directional microphone and position it away from the speakers.
One other cool thing to mention about the Logitech headphones: when you plug them in, Skype automatically switches the default audio device to the headphones-no need to drill into preferences!
I hope you found this post useful. If you have additional suggestions for eliminating audio feedback or want to share your audio conferencing setup, please leave a comment!