In an NPR article posted Monday (and in an “All Things Considered” segment), Nell Greenfieldboyce urges users of Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex, etc., to pay attention to how their computers are altering their voices. She points to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found high-quality audio makes a speaker sound more appealing and convincing to others.

Well, duh.

Brian Scholl, a cognitive scientist at Yale University, and his team recorded people speaking in everyday situations — like filing an insurance claim or going through a job interview. Then they intentionally degraded the audio to make it sound tinny and low-quality.

Using an online platform, they had hundreds of people each listen to just one version of a recording. Which version they heard was randomized.

After listening, participants were asked to rate the speaker. And sure enough, poor audio quality led people to rate the speaker as less attractive, less intelligent and less persuasive. All based solely on sound quality.

This absolutely cracks me up, because an entire scientific team ran a study to prove what the AV industry has been screaming for years: Audio quality matters. And for a lot of you, it’s literally your job to make sure that quality stays sharp.

Yes, studies like this help your case. But the takeaway the researchers landed on? “Maybe check your audio before a meeting and/or purchase a high-quality microphone.”

Again — yeah. We know.

Check out the NPR article and segment here.