With the prolonged lockdown period most of, if not all, your conversations have been over some digital medium – be it your mobile phone or a video conference call on your PC or mobile device.

What you may have noticed by now is that the audio experience has started taking its toll on you.  You tire quickly during meetings and by the end of the day you feel exhausted and your ears are hurting.

We have all been on group calls where some participants are softly spoken, the microphone someone is using is of poor quality, or some participants’ connections are poor and you struggle to hear everyone clearly.

This is exacerbated by you either using a set of earphones, that you had to dig out of a drawer at the beginning of the lockdown, or you are using your laptop’s speakers – neither of which provide you with a comfortable listening experience. So you find yourself turning up the volume in an attempt to hear more clearly.

Besides the obvious strain this places on your ears, there are several other reasons that are causing you to fatigue:

  • Your brain trying to translate something it knows is not real – digital audio – into something that sounds real. The harder this is for your brain, the harder this is on you.
  • There is a lot of other noise on the calls you are having, and besides being distracting, it also makes following the conversation more difficult.

To minimise audio fatigue, you need a better quality microphone and speaker – one that has full duplex audio with echo cancellation and that delivers a more natural reproduction of the audio stream.

One such device is the Yealink CP700 portable speaker phone.  It is cost effective and allows for USB connection to your PC, laptop or Macbook and a Bluetooth connection to your mobile devices. The CP700 is certified for use with Microsoft Teams, enables quality audio pickup up to 2-meters and has a high-quality speaker.

Another reason that I love this device is that it has intuitive LED indicators that simplify collaboration while connecting to your call and during the conversation.

With this quality audio device, you will find yourself participating in the conversation instead of trying to hear those on the call or trying to make yourself heard.