Zoom Audio Choppy, Cutting Out, or Garbled? Try This Fix

Are you on a Zoom meeting and your audio, or someone elses audio feed, is very choppy, garbled, cutting out, or robotic sounding? Zoom conferences use a lot of bandwidth, particularly when you are using video streaming and audio streaming concurrently.

Why is my Zoom audio cutting out or choppy?

Sometimes Zoom audio is choppy or garbled briefly because of a hiccup in an internet connection, a bad cellular signal, or interference in a wi-fi or cellular device if you’re moving around.

Those type of temporary connection issues tend to resolve themselves quickly when the internet signal is stronger again. For example, if you’re walking around on a Zoom call from your phone, going behind a large rock or metal object like a fire place, refrigerator, building, or boulder, can cause the connection signal to dramatically reduce.

Whenever possible, aim to be in clear site of the wi-fi router you are connected to.

And yes, that means typically a bad Zoom connection is due to the internet connection itself.

Helpful trick to improve audio on Zoom conferences: stop video

For situations where you’re on a Zoom video conference and the Zoom audio is choppy, cutting out, or sounding like a garbled robot, there’s a handy trick you or whoever is having the audio problems can use; turning off the video feed.

If audio is chopping heavily on Zoom and cutting out, often you can resolve the problem, or at least greatly improve the audio quality, simply by turning off the video stream.

You can do this by tapping on “Stop Video” and the video icon in the Zoom app.

This trick works in Zoom for Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, and the web.

The reason this works is that more of the available bandwidth is used for the audio stream, as the video stream is turned off.

Video streaming uses a significant amount of bandwidth, much more so than audio, so by turning off the Zoom camera you are able to prioritize the internet connection for the audio side of things, allowing the conversation to continue, even without the Zoom video feed.

Conversely, if the video feed is more important than the audio stream, you can sometimes salvage that and make it less choppy by muting your audio on Zoom.

If you know of any other helpful tricks for improving Zoom audio quality or Zoom chats in general, share with us in the comments. And of course, let us know how this particular audio trick worked for you!

Check out some more Zoom tips too, while you’re at it.