Why your video sounds like a room
The echo is a distance problem before it is a software problem.
Play back something you recorded in your spare room, then something recorded by somebody who does this for a living. The difference is not the microphone. It is that you can hear the walls and they cannot.
Most people diagnose this as an equipment fault, buy a better microphone and end up with a clearer recording of the same room. A better microphone hears the walls better. What shifts it is moving closer to the microphone you already own, then putting soft things between you and the nearest hard surfaces.
What is actually happening in the room?
Your voice leaves your mouth in every direction, not in a beam aimed at the microphone.
Some goes straight to the microphone and arrives first. The rest hits the wall, the window, the desk, the ceiling and the floor and comes back, arriving slightly later and quieter, having lost some of its higher frequencies to whatever it bounced off. The microphone records all of it, stacked on itself.
That stack is what you are hearing. Not an effect. Copies of your own voice, arriving late.
Why are small rooms worse than big ones?
Because the copies arrive sooner.
Sound travels at a fixed speed, so a reflection off a wall two metres away comes back very shortly after the direct sound, while one off a wall twenty metres away takes far longer. A long delay you hear as an echo, a separate event, the thing that happens in a cathedral or a car park. A short delay you do not hear as a separate sound at all. It smears into the original, thickens it, and gives the voice that boxy quality that sounds like a video call.
Small rooms, then, rarely sound echoey in the way people mean the word. They sound close and hard and slightly hollow, which is worse, because it is harder to name and harder to remove.
What fixes the most for nothing?
Three moves, in order of effect. The first does more than the other two together.
Get closer to the microphone
The direct sound gets louder as you approach. The reflections do not, because they are still travelling the same distance around the room whatever you do. Halve your distance to the microphone and you have changed the balance between yourself and the room without touching the room.
This is why a modest microphone close to a mouth beats an excellent one across a desk. It has a limit, which has its own post: too close brings its own problems.
Put soft things in the room
Reflections come off hard flat surfaces. Anything soft and thick absorbs part of what hits it.
You are not treating the room, you are interrupting the worst paths: the ones between you and the nearest large flat surfaces. A rug on a bare floor. Curtains drawn in daylight. A sofa. A bookcase with uneven contents, which scatters sound rather than absorbing it; scattering helps, though it is not a substitute for real absorption placed at the reflection points that matter. And a duvet hung over a clothes airer behind the camera, which is one of the most effective things here and looks precisely as ridiculous as it sounds.
Stop recording in the two worst spots
A bare window is a large, hard, flat, reflective surface, and most people sit beside one because that is where the light is. A corner is worse: two walls meeting send reflections between each other and back at you.
Move into the room, and face across the space rather than a wall a metre from your nose. If the window has to stay, draw the curtains and put the light back with a lamp, trading an acoustic problem you cannot fix for one you can.
Does software fix it?
Partly, and the part it cannot fix is the part that matters.
Echo removal works by identifying the reflected copies of your voice and reducing them. The trouble is that the reflections are made of your voice: same frequencies, same words, same everything except timing and level. There is no way to remove them that does not remove some of the original.
Applied gently, you get a modest improvement. Applied hard, which is what most automatic tools default to, the voice comes back thin, watery and faintly metallic, the ends of words dropping off. Listeners cannot name that. They say it sounds processed, or that the person sounds tired. It is the sound of a room being taken out and part of a speaker leaving with it.
So: fix what you can in the room, then let software handle the remainder rather than the plan.
What a treated room is not
Two words get confused here, and the confusion costs money.
Soundproofing stops sound getting into or out of a room. It is achieved with mass: heavy doors, sealed gaps, dense construction. It is a building job and has almost nothing to do with your problem.
Absorption stops sound bouncing around inside a room, and that is your problem. Thin foam works on the higher frequencies and does very little for the low boxy ones, which is why a room covered in it can still sound like a room. Thicker and softer beats more of it, and egg boxes do nothing.
What to try this week
1. Move the microphone closer and re-record the same thirty seconds. 2. Draw the curtains, and put a rug down if the floor is hard. 3. Hang a duvet on something behind the camera, facing you. 4. Get out of the corner and out of the window bay. 5. Record the same thirty seconds again and play it against step one.
If steps two to four make an audible difference, the room was the problem and is now a smaller one. If they change nothing, you were already close enough that the room was not what you were hearing, and whatever you dislike is something else entirely. That is a better position than the one you started the week in.
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