Speaking into a microphone? Your audio quality can impact the way people view you By Nell Greenfieldboyce Published March 24, 2025 at 3:26 PM EDT Listen • 2:36 ...

Holly Kostrzewski would love to see more women holding microphones. She's helping start a chapter of the Mic Drop Club.

That experience made him want to study the effect of microphone quality on people's perceptions. He teamed up with two members of his lab, Robert Walter and Joan Ongchoco, to design an experiment.

We almost always see eye-to-eye. He happened to be participating on Zoom, using the microphone of an older, not-so-hot laptop, and his voice had that sort of tinny quality," Scholl recalls.