Something that excites me personally, Microsoft Teams gets an option to tune your audio to high fidelity. This can be used to play high quality music for things like online exercise classes, music lessons or live music performances, but also to join team meetings with higher microphones. range and not compress and “optimize” the audio.

It will offer the ability to disable components such as echo cancellation, noise cancellation and gain control. This is a real challenge when you connect professional audio equipment to Microsoft Teams.

For example, I have the Shure MV7 which is a USB and XLR microphone. When connected over USB to Microsoft Teams, Teams continues to dynamically change microphone gain. Shure has put something in their software to force gain correction, but most USB mics don’t offer this option.

Why would you want to use a high-end USB or XLR mic with Teams? When you record things like podcasts, you can get an audio level that cannot be matched by headphones or a speaker.

In music mode, Teams supports mono audio at sample rates up to 32 kHz at 128 kbps, Teams will automatically adjust the audio bit rate according to the available bandwidth, down to 48 kbps if necessary .

High fidelity mode can also have use cases in healthcare where a remote doctor wants to hear distant patients cough or heart beat. There are even digital stethoscopes for this scenario.

I’m curious if this uses the new Satin codec. Satin is the evolution of SILK and operates in wideband voice mode in a bit rate range of 6 kbps to 36 kbps. Or if it reverts to a less compressed codec.

It is supposed to be deployed this month. I’ll update the blog when I get my hands on it. Subscribe here for updates

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