Webex suppresses bass

[Chinchilla_Editor]

Hi

We have been using Webex since late 2019, and I have noticed that when listening to music with Webex running, the bass tones are greatly diminished. For example, when I shut down my laptop at the end of the day but leave Spotify running, as soon as the Webex process ends, a great wall of warm, rich, bass noise is added back into the music just before Windows ends Spotify.  

We speculate that this is due to the noise-canceling feature of Webex, so my question for the audience is, will we ever see a day when noise canceling (or whatever it its that squashes the bass) is a toggle? In other words, that Webex will feature some kind of 'music mode' for when we are simply using it as a chat communicator and are not in a call or video meeting?

Bonus question: is there a way to cheat Webex into allowing bass tones in music? We've tried various 3rd-party noise equalizers and so on, buuut...

Thanks!

[Roger Kallberg]

Interesting. Out of curiosity have you tested to turn off noice cancelling functionality in your Webex client to see if it’s actually this that is affecting this?

[Chinchilla_Editor]

Hi Roger

We've tried some different things with this. In Webex Options > Audio > Webex smart audio, we've tried all three options: Noise removal, Optimize for my voice, and (the tantalizingly named!) Music Mode. (At the time of writing, this is Webex version 41.11.0.20717). However, none of these three options affect the direct playback of music files or streams, i.e. bass levels are always suppressed and the music has quite a tinny sound.

I can confirm that it is Webex, or maybe a subprocess, that causes this because if I exit Webex while Spotify (for example) is playing, then the sound immediately becomes warmer, richer, and fuller, and all the bottom range comes back in. (I should also add that we've tried different headsets and headphones, with no change).

It's not a showstopper obviously, rather, I wanted to mention this because I haven't seen this topic discussed anywhere else. I suppose we're lucky that our company policy allows for music streaming while we're working.

Anyway, if you have any ideas about this we'd love to hear them, otherwise no worries.