Distorted audio to participants only

[Schwa]

This has happened on 2 separate occasions. I have a room setup with separate mixer and mics, audio interface etc.  video camera and playback devices through a video switcher and sound reinforcement in the room. Everything sounds great except twice, the outgoing audio has become distorted to the zoom participants. The audio signal path is clean from mic to audio interface. Since I don't monitor the actual zoom audio, I never know this is happening until people start complaining that it is distorted.  To remedy the problem, I have to leave the meeting and rejoin.

[Ray_Harwood]

Hi, @Schwa,

It would be helpful to me in troubleshooting, if you would please provide a complete description of your audio chain.  For example, here's mine: A ZoomCorp ZDM-1 Dynamic Mic, into Port 1 of a RodeCaster Pro, to the PC over USB, RodeCaster Pro Stereo is selected in the Zoom Audio Microphone setting, running on an HP-Z Tower with XEON processor and 64G RAM, over a wired Ethernet connection to the router.

As much information as you can provide will be helpful... it doesn't have to be that complete or technical, if you don't have the details.

In my experience, it's extremely rare that a clean sound received by the Zoom Client on your machine will be corrupted by Zoom in transit to the attendees.  I do find that even "professional Zoom hosts" occasionally end up with software glitches between their audio equipment and the PC, which then affects what the Zoom client picks up and sends.  It may sound fine when listening to it through the audio equipment headset, but the trouble is often between there and the Zoom client.  It gets more complicated when the audio travels through the video mixer too, and increases the number of potential trouble sources.

It's one reason I always have a second computer system (a low end BeeLink box) as an attendee logged in here in my office, with a headset attached so I can check occasionally that the audio being received by the attendees is the quality I'm looking for.

I look forward to hearing from you.

[Eliot]

Accessing meeting and phone statistics – Zoom Support may be helpful in diagnosing the issue.

overall stats show cpu usage, memory usage, bandwidth, etc.

audio stats show frequency, latency, jitter and packet loss for both send and receive

video stats show for both send and receive: latency, jitter, packet loss, resolution,  and frames per second

please see attached screen shots.

[OldSirAlan]

We have a similar problem.  The distortion is only heard by the participants since the meeting room doesn't hear the sound from the meeting room microphone.  Hardware is a Kandao conferencing camea connected to an older Mac Mini.  I'm not sure how the Mini is connected to the Internet, but the building has no internal wired network and depends upon an AT&T "small business" (read residential) system over copper.  I'm about to experiment with an older "eero" mesh network to gather network statistics and hopefully increase network bandwidth to the Zoom system.

[Ray_Harwood]

Welcome to the Zoom Community, @OldSirAlan.

Connect the Kandao to a laptop or other device and see if you get the same results.

And check the sample rate for the mic. I don’t have documentation available, but I think Zoom prefers 32k or 48k.

See if this slightly dated document helps:

https://community.zoom.com/t5/Zoom-Meetings/Zoom-Audio-Rate-48K/m-p/73153/highlight/true#M39855 

[OldSirAlan]

The problem occurs only after a 20 or more minutes after the start of the meeting.  It has worked for a long time without problems and we've started restarting the connection to the meeting after the first hour.  I'll communicate with the person who installed this and check that out.  The distortion affects all Zoom participants but has no obvious effect in the meeting room.  My memory is that eventually the video feed to the Zoom clients also fails.  Thank you.