If you’re sick of Microsoft Teams speaker feedback causing problems with your conferencing sessions, you’re in the right place. Speaker feedback can be a pretty annoying issue, both for you, and your colleagues, making it harder to host effective meetings.
Audio clarity is essential in any workplace conversation, whether you’re hosting a meeting with team members or communicating with customers via Microsoft Teams.
Fortunately, there are ways to address these issues, whether you’re suffering with echo problems, or reverb. Here, we’ll show you the top strategies you can use to minimize feedback and improve the audio quality of your Microsoft Teams meetings.
Microsoft Teams Speaker Feedback: Echo and Reverb
Before you can start fixing Microsoft Teams speaker feedback issues, it’s worth noting there are different audio problems that can harm your meeting experience. Most people suffering from speaker feedback are dealing with “echo”. This is what happens when the sound from a speaker is picked up by a microphone (usually because your speakers and microphone are too close to each other).
You might also encounter echo when your speaker volume is particularly loud, your microphone is extremely sensitive, or you’re using a device's “Microphone Boost” feature.
Alternatively, reverb is what happens when your voice comes out of a speaker, bounces around the room, and then enters the microphone again. The main difference between echo and reverb is that you can usually resolve echo problems by adjusting your hardware. Reverb typically requires changes to the meeting room itself, like adding soft surfaces to absorb noise.
In addition, there are other forms of “noise” that can affect the quality of your meeting. External noises like the sound of your computer fan or outdoor traffic can often be picked up by high-quality microphones. To address this issue, you’ll need to use speaker isolation and noise cancellation solutions (we’ll explore the top options for this shortly).
How to Fix Microsoft Teams Speaker Feedback: Easy Options
There are a few simple ways to fix Microsoft Teams speaker feedback and echo. The easiest option by far is to use a set of headphones. If you’re using headphones (wired or wireless) for your meetings, your microphone won’t pick up your voice, or the voice of your colleagues like it would if you were using a set of speakers.
Using headphones in your meeting is particularly useful if you have multiple people in one room collaborating in the same conference space. Certain headphones also actively cancel out additional noises, which can improve the clarity of your meetings too.
Aside from wearing a set of headphones, other options include:
Using the Microsoft Teams Mute Function
Issues with Microsoft Teams speaker feedback and echo often become more complex the more people you add to a meeting. That’s particularly true if multiple team members are working in the same space when collaborating with remote or external staff members.
One of the easiest strategies to reduce feedback issues here, is to get everyone in the meeting to mute themselves when they’re not talking. This doesn’t just reduce the risk of people talking over each other at the same time. It’s also a great way to find out which speaker is causing the echo issues.
Getting everyone who isn’t hearing the echo in a meeting to mute themselves and then unmute themselves individually will help you quickly pinpoint the cause of the issue.
You can then ask the person causing the echo problem to wear a pair of headphones, or adjust their microphone and speaker settings.
Adjusting Microphone Settings
Another easy way to reduce the risk of Microsoft Teams speaker feedback, is to adjust your microphone settings. Open your control panel on Windows, and search for your Hardware and Sound setting controls. Open the “Audio” or “Sound” settings panel, and select the Recording tab.
Double-click on the Microphone you’re using and click on the Level tab to reduce the “Microphone Boost” setting—if it’s available. This will reduce the microphone's sensitivity, so it is less likely to pick up sound from your speakers.
Some Microphones will also have built-in features which allow you to enable noise suppression, or acoustic echo cancellation. It’s definitely worth applying these features, where possible, to reduce the risk of unwanted noise in your meetings.
