updates make Zoom Rooms microphone audio worse

[fdpo]

Our small church has been using Zoom Rooms for hybrid worship services for several years. It has been a wonderful way for home-bound and remote members to stay connected, and we appreciate the two-way interaction that Zoom offers compared to streaming alternatives.

Unfortunately, the experience has declined over time. My primary concern is audio quality:

• We use multiple inexpensive USB microphones (including those built into webcams). In past versions of Zoom Rooms, audio was good and worked reliably. But recent changes to noise suppression and echo cancellation have made the sound consistently worse. It is now difficult to achieve good audio. (We do have a direct analog connection from the church sound system, which works well — but only when the speaker is at the pulpit mic.) Please consider fixing the USB audio issues, even if that means reverting to an earlier implementation.

And while I am complaining, other issues we’ve noticed:

• Microphone selection requires too many steps. On the tablet UI, changing the mic now takes four taps (More → Settings → Microphone → choose mic). Could the microphone control be made a first-class button, similar to the camera button?
• Mirrored video in the local view. A recent update forces local camera views to be mirrored, with no option to disable it. Previously, the non-mirrored view was better suited to our use. Please restore the ability to choose.

We continue to value Zoom Rooms and want to keep using it. But these changes have made it harder to deliver a high-quality hybrid service experience.

[bstrelko]

Valid complaints - these will need to go through support.zoom.us and cannot be resolved here, unfortunately.

One item of note - the mirrored local video view. I am still able to toggle mine when running the latest GA release.

Can you provide info on what type of hardware you're using for the compute & camera in the affected room, as well as which version of Zoom Rooms you're running and a snapshot of the camera controls dialog missing the Mirror-Effect toggle?

[sweaver]

Not to thread hijack, but we experienced the same thing today after the latest update.  No hardware or room changes, only the update to the latest Zoom room.  We had multiple complaints from meeting attendees.  Prior to this update, there were no issues.  Using a Shure Stem Wall for microphone and speaker.