Mic echo on screen recording

[Anilocak]

Hello,

I’m using MacBook Air M1
I want to screen record my zoom meeting.
There is no problem with my sound but there is echo when others talking.
What kind of setting should I make?
As I guess while screen recording, OBS recording sound on mic on Mac at the same time.

 

[AaronD]

Do you have open-air speakers? If so, then your mic is probably picking them up.

Headphones would solve that. Earbuds would look better on camera, but I've also seen them bleed into a mic, from a combination of not sealing well in the ear and being turned up enough to compensate for that lack of seal.

 

[Anilocak]

Headphones would solve that. Earb

hello, yes I've tried with earbuds ıt does not make problem. but ı need to fix this with open air speakers.
I tried some settings ıt sometimes work but scene did not work after close and reopen the app so I deleted the scene made same settings and there was echo again, I can use application snapping for that problem but ı could not find the right zoom option lol

 

[AaronD]

I've tried with earbuds ıt does not make problem. but ı need to fix this with open air speakers.

That's a difficult problem. Might even be physically impossible to solve in general. Even career professional audio engineers have trouble with it outside of a strictly controlled environment. So don't be surprised if you can't do it either.

The trouble is that the air itself *is* a signal path, that you can't turn off. It's always there, always connected, and pretty much never a clear, transparent channel. There are always distortions.

So to make "Echo Cancellation" work (technical term), you have to know what those distortions are - which depend on absolutely everything! - make your processing to do exactly that, and *then* subtract the processed speaker signal from the mic. If you move something - anything at all, by even the slightest amount - then that distortion changes and the processing has to adapt.

For a speakerphone, whether sitting on a conference table or built into your smartphone, the mic and speaker are so close together and both fixed to the same rigid chunk of material, that the effects are predominantly related to the transducers themselves and the immediate space around them. By the time you get out to the distance that you normally control things in, the effects are a small enough percentage that the processing can (usually) listen for and adapt by that much. But it's still not a universal thing by any stretch of the imagination.

If the mic and speaker can move relative to each other, or if things are changing acoustically relatively close to them compared to the distance between, then you can't use Echo Cancellation. This is probably why OBS doesn't have it: it'll be useless anyway for the people who need it. You have to fall back on the old hard and fast rule of live sound in general, which is, "NEVER put a significant signal in the air, where your mics are."

For a live concert, they're often running right on the edge of that rule. If you occasionally hear a brief shriek, that's because they went just slightly over and had to pull it back quickly. If there's a significant delay involved, like through a general-purpose computer's audio system, then that shriek becomes a discrete echo.