A new study from Yale looked at people’s perception of a speaker based on how their mic makes them sound. During one meeting, Scholl was on a call with a colleague who had an excellent sound setup and another who was talking through a tinny laptop mic. “Every experiment we conducted showed that a familiar tinny or hollow sound associated with a poor-quality microphone negatively affects people’s impressions of a speaker— independent of the message conveyed,” Scholl said in the Yale blogpost.