Audio mutes with piano playing

[MJ3]

I have a new HP Spectre x 360 laptop with an Intel core i7-1139OH processor, 512 GB Intel SSD +32 GB memory which runs on Windows 11. I am a music teacher. When I speak into the microphone, the sound is fine. But when I play the piano, the piano mutes. Specifically, when I play a note on the piano, the recipient hears a short thunk. If I play a scale or arpeggio, the following notes are totally silenced. No combination of settings for original sound, high-fidelity music mode, signal processing by Windows drivers and echo-cancellation has resolved this problem. I took the laptop to the Geek Squad and they reinstalled Windows 11. If I revert to my old  Dell computer running Windows 10, Zoom works fine. 

Any clues as to how to fix the problem in Windows 11?

[Alex_H · Accepted solution]

Welp, I figured it our for my case. Turns out all I had to do was come online and publicly complain  about it so that the answer would fall on my lap. There is a system app preinstalled by HP called B&O Audio Control. (This HP Pavilion system has Bang and Olufsen sound built in).

Upon discovering this app and opening it, I noted there is a "Noise Cancellation"  settings tab/section. I went there. Noise cancellation was enabled for the microphone array in this app. I turned it off. Problem solved. This apps settings is overriding any kind of noise suppression settings you might be setting in the Zoom app. Before turning off this setting the microphone test in the Zoom audio settings would not pickup the piano at all. Now it comes through crystal clear in the test so I'm assuming it will work fine in meetings too now. The B&O Noise Cancellation is very aggressive. Problem solved. So maybe not entirely a Zoom/Skype problem after all...don't know if you'd consider this a HP Software bug, Windows bug, or none of the above. But now it works as expected.

[cleec1 · Accepted solution]

This is the first time I have heard anyone (including Zoom Dev Team) mention B&O as the possible culprit in all of these months of suffering. I unplugged my external sound card and re-enabled all of the array mic/speaker/ sound card to test this. I opened the B&O app and found noise cancellation toggled to "on". It would NOT allow me to turn it off. I contacted my go-to tech support person who advised me to open the B&O app and, while the control window was open, hit ALT + F4 to shut down the app. Miracles happened as the angels sang.  I can now play musical instruments over Zoom. With luck it will continue. (But I have tried other work-arounds which were only temporary.)  He told me that I did have the option to uninstall B&O if I continue to have the problem.  He said that it should not affect any of the operations to not have it on the computer.

[tsedergher]

THEN THAT'S GOOD