Echo

[necrouch]

Tonight I was unable to hold a meeting due to an echo from 4 out of the 5 particpants.  We tried turning off each microphone, changing hosts, restarting our computers, and leaving the meeting and signing in again.  We finally gave up. What is going on with Zoom?

[Ray_Harwood]

Welcome to the Zoom Community, @necrouch.

In my experience, this is almost always caused by two people in the same room using Zoom with speakers. In does a great job of filtering out most noise, focusing on allowing human voice through. But when there’s another computer joining the same meeting with speakers, Zoom thinks that voice needs to be passed through.

In cases like this, mute everyone, ask them one at a time to unmute/turn on their mics. As soon as you hear the echo, you know one of the two parties involved. Mute them and ask if they have a second computer on the call.

Another less frequent issue is when someone with a fancy audio setup has misconfigured their audio chain, and are feeding Zoom back into their mic input device. Doesn’t happen often in most people’s meetings though.