How to Improve Audio Quality on Zoom Calls and Recordings

Zoom calls or recordings with echo, background noise, or muffled audio that makes you sound unprofessional?

Zoom audio quality problems fall into two categories: live call audio (what participants hear during the meeting) and recording audio (what's captured for later review or sharing). For live calls, Zoom's audio settings panel has meaningful controls: noise suppression level, echo cancellation, original sound mode, and microphone selection. For recordings, Zoom's built-in processing has limits — the audio captured to local disk or Zoom cloud is processed but may still have audible background noise, especially on lower-quality input devices. Post-processing the recording file with AI noise removal adds a second cleanup pass that typically improves recording quality significantly beyond Zoom's built-in processing.

What You Get:

• Enabling 'Original Sound' in Zoom and handling noise removal in post produces cleaner recordings than relying on Zoom's aggressive live compression
• Changing Zoom's noise suppression from 'Auto' to 'High' significantly reduces background noise for live call participants
• AI post-processing of Zoom recording files removes noise that Zoom's live processing leaves behind, improving recordings shared with absent participants
• Zoom's 'Suppress background noise' setting has four levels — the right choice depends on your room noise level and prevents over-processing that can muffle voices
• Separate audio track recording in Zoom (available in settings) captures unprocessed audio that produces cleaner AI noise removal results than the mixed recording