On Zoom meetings with many participants, the audio starts fine but eventually transitions to an extreme choppy Dalek-like distortion that is unintelligible. If I leave the meeting and then rejoin, the audio will be fine again but will soon change to the same unuseable distortion.
I’m on an iMac running macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 with hardwired Ethernet. I paid extra to double my ISP data rate but no change. Turning off my video and muting my mic, also no change.
Video meetings and audio calls on Facetime and Microsoft Teams, as well as videos on Netflix and YouTube, are fine and always have been. I also have a PC running Teams, and an HD television with Netflix and Amazon Prime, also all fine and always have been. We can watch internet video on the television and desktop simultaneously and it’s fine. Zoom meetings with maybe 10 or fewer participants are fine, but the 25+ person meeting I just gave up on was hopeless. I’m just a participant, not host.
Seems like a distinctive Zoom problem. Most online references blame wifi (not using it here) or the user’s internet connection (tests say it’s what I paid for), or they suggest fixes I already tried. The PC belongs to my employer and I’m not allowed to try Zoom on it.
Not sure if this is the cause of your issue, but with High Sierra and Catalina I found that if I had a YouTube video or something like it running in the background in Safari it would cause some serious choppiness, not because of bandwidth, more likely because of some bug in Safari and/or the internals of MacOS that are used for video.
So, try closing your browser and see if that helps. If not, nothing lost.
Full disclosure, I work for a company that provides a competing product. And, quite honestly I avoid any problem where the customer requires a teleconference to troubleshoot, because it’s usually just an excuse for the customer to avoid clearly defining their problem using language.
But, I’m on a Windows platform, I don’t get to dictate the format the customer can communicate in, and when you start to get large numbers of folks in the room Zoom seems to have weird audio issues. I’ve just grown accustomed to asking people to repeat themselves in them. I don’t know why it only happens to me on Zoom, but that’s where I’ve seen it.
I’m assuming that you’re using the installed zoom client, rather than ‘run in browser’, and that the other participants in the meeting are not reporting the same issue in the same meetings?
If so, that suggests to me that the zoom client is receiving all of the participant audio streams separately and is mixing them locally for output. This still could actually be a video issue even though it is affecting audio (i.e. if the video stream has priority, and there is a lot of it)
Does the problem persist if you turn off incoming video?
It might be worth trying ‘join in browser’ as it does use different technologies and I think more of the grunt work is done server side (at the expense of a lower grade of meeting experience where you may only see other participants when they are speaking).
Alternatively (and probably difficult to actually organise, or may not even be within your power to impose) the meeting organiser could perhaps mute all participants and they unmute (hitting the space bar does it) when they want to speak.
Sorry those aren’t very useful suggestions - but that’s pretty much all I have…
I was using the installed zoom client. I tried closing this and joining the meeting with a browser but didn’t figure out how to do it – all I got was instructions to download and install the client. But I didn’t pursue very far because I actually wasn’t sure I could run in a browser, so I will experiment with how to do that.
I don’t mind not seeing people. I’d accept audio only, at least in these particular meetings. I actually didn’t realize I could turn off incoming video, I only knew I could turn off my own outgoing video (which I tried).
I did see that almost all the other participants were almost always muted anyway.