These could be useful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_noise_control

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_gain_control

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_suppression_and_cancellat...

Wow, didn't know it did this. I'm doing my own audio processing before it gets to the browser, so this is actively harmful. This bit:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Tweaks#Disable_WebR...

proved helpful. Wish I'd known sooner.

Same here. This is super helpful to know. I've tried to incorporate a Blackhole-Reaper workflow to apply an equalizer/compressor/limiter to video calls and have experienced odd behavior in both Firefox and Chrome which this might explain.

This is why I love HN -- I'm running basically the same setup as you two. There are dozens of us, dozens!

Better audio in calls using the browser, seems pretty clear to me.

I was not aware that this is something the browser would do.

It has to, and as far as I understand it always has (as well as the operating system).

Take for example echo suppression. For this to work, the algorithm has to be aware of the audio that's being output in real-time. We can't have the server do that, of course, and it would be very inefficient to do this in JavaScript (which also wouldn't have access to audio output by other tabs or processes).

So this has to be something done by the browser, in a very low latency and efficient way.

As far as I understand it, Chrome and Firefox have both been doing browser side DSP in WebRTC for a while. There is a way to disable this however.

I would've expected this to be done at the OS level, or at the very least have this configurable and opt-in at the browser level just so you know and can decide as I assume that it would be counter-productive to have both the OS and the browser do it.

Modern operating systems provides APIs so they can coordinate this kind of audio processing, so you don't have to worry about it.

It isn't opt-in at the browser level, but there is a standard in WebRTC to disable this across all browsers.

You can test it out with meet.jitsi.org or via element if you like