> online people are muffled or too loud or just hard to understand
Crappy (i.e. cheap) microphones and wireless connections. I use a Sennheiser EPOS headset - wired USB connection and a microphone with a passive background noise rejection - and it's all but perfect. The quality is high, and it was under $100.
Non-headset mics, even shotgun mics, are going to be sensitive to background noise. That's just how they are. They have a lot of rejection around them, but it's not 0. Headset mics put the mic close enough to your mouth that rejecting other noise becomes a lot simpler.
Oh, and Google et.al. try too hard sometimes to "fix" audio that they'll screw a decent audio setup up by "fixing" the gain dynamically.
Crappy (i.e. cheap) microphones and wireless connections. I use a Sennheiser EPOS headset - wired USB connection and a microphone with a passive background noise rejection - and it's all but perfect. The quality is high, and it was under $100.
Non-headset mics, even shotgun mics, are going to be sensitive to background noise. That's just how they are. They have a lot of rejection around them, but it's not 0. Headset mics put the mic close enough to your mouth that rejecting other noise becomes a lot simpler.
Oh, and Google et.al. try too hard sometimes to "fix" audio that they'll screw a decent audio setup up by "fixing" the gain dynamically.