Hi folks,

    I have a question about my microphone audio quality when participating in a browser-based video conference, i.e., Google Meet and Jitsi on chromium browser.

    Starting last week, I have received numerous reports from coworkers that my audio is considerably higher quality than normal. Although my audio input has always been a high end vocal mic, the reports have indicated that I sound even better than I usually do in these conferences.

    My daily driver machine is a self-built Xeon workstation running Arch Linux with (I think) a well-configured RT kernel and JACK2, whose configuration if optimized for USB audio interfaces via this guide [0]. I use a Peluso mic connected directly to my RME Babyface Pro interface, which is running via one of my system's USB2 ports.

    In pursuit of understanding why this is occurring, I looked at my JACK2 settings to see if I'd changed anything lately. Sure enough, I noticed that I have been working at a larger JACK2 hardware buffer size than normal. I typically set my size to 64 since I do a lot of real-time audio work, but have had it set to 256 or 512 lately to do some different kinds of stuff on the system.

    So, my question boils down to: is it reasonable to suspect the hardware buffer size has something to do with these sudden quality improvement reports from my friends & co-workers? If so, any insights into why this is the case would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Andrew

[0] https://wiki.linuxaudio.org/wiki/list_of_jack_frame_period_settings_ideal_for_usb_interface