"The sound was a bit distant." "I could not really hear the vibrato." "The pianissimo got lost." Every teacher who gives lessons on Zoom, Teams or Meet has heard these sentences dozens of times. It is not the student's fault, nor your connection's: it is a design choice made by those platforms. They were born for business meetings, and to make a meeting work well you compress, you filter, you flatten. For a music lesson, that same choice is a disaster.

Three numbers to understand once and for all

Digital audio depends on three parameters: sample rate, bitrate, channels (mono or stereo).

• Sample rate (in kHz): how many "snapshots" per second the computer takes to record sound. The higher it is → the more high frequencies can be reproduced. The CD standard is 44.1 kHz; the professional one is 48 kHz.
• Bitrate (in kbps): how much data per second you devote to describing each snapshot. The higher it is → the less compression, the more dynamic nuance.
• Channels: mono or stereo. Mono means a single channel, stereo means two distinct channels that restore spatial depth.

A real comparison between platforms

• Zoom (default): 32 kHz, ~64 kbps, mono. "Original Sound" mode goes up to 48 kHz and disables some filters, but it stays mono and with a compressed bitrate.
• Microsoft Teams: 32 kHz, ~64 kbps, mono. Noise cancellation filters cannot be turned off.
• Google Meet: 48 kHz, around 32 kbps, mono. Generous declared bandwidth, very low actual bitrate.
• uwClassrooms: 48 kHz, 512 kbps, stereo. No DSP filter active by default.

The difference between 64 kbps mono and 512 kbps stereo is not "a bit better": it is eight times more audio information per second. That margin goes straight into everything that is dynamic, harmonic and spatial.

When detail makes a teaching difference

Piano. The difference between a pianissimo and a piano-piano does not travel through a 64 kbps channel. The platform's automatic compression "raises" the pianissimo and "lowers" the forte: the student does not hear real dynamics and their hand learns the wrong ones.

Strings. Vibrato is a frequency modulation that produces very fine harmonics. A compressed audio band levels them out. The result: the student hears a "flat" sound and cannot copy the model.

Winds. The tone colour of a flute, a clarinet, a saxophone or a trumpet lives in the upper harmonics and in the relationship between fundamental and partials. When the audio band is compressed, the teacher only hears the fundamental: tonguing flattens out, the "breath" of a baroque flute disappears, the clarinet's subtleties of intonation never arrive. For wind instruments, HD audio is not a luxury: it is the difference between a useful lesson and a lesson in form.

Acoustic guitar. The nail on the string, fingerstyle, full strumming: it is all a world of fast transients and harmonics in the high region. A 32 kHz mono platform returns an indistinct "carpet" and erases the difference between clean sweep picking and a smeared mess. At 48 kHz stereo you can tell every note apart again.

Singing. Sibilants, the glottal onset, vocal vibrato, the colour of vowels — it all lives in the high frequencies and in micro-dynamics. On a compressed 32 kHz mono platform they are scraped away together with the "background noise".

Spatiality. In stereo the student perceives where you are placed relative to the microphone, where the instrument's sound is coming from. It is information the brain uses to reconstruct the performance, and in mono it simply is not there.

Why meeting platforms cannot change

Zoom, Teams and Meet serve millions of users at the same time, in every network condition. To guarantee the meeting even on bad connections, they compress audio aggressively and apply "bandwidth-saving" DSP filters. It is a sensible choice for their use case. For music it is the wrong one: a music lesson lives precisely in what meetings throw away.

What changes for a school

For a music school or a conservatory, teaching lessons and masterclasses on a platform with professional audio is not a detail: it is the difference between "we had to go online because of the pandemic" and "online is a real teaching mode, on a par with being there in person". Students and teachers notice within 30 seconds of their first lesson.

Do you want to hear the difference?

We have prepared a direct comparison of the same piece transmitted over Zoom, Teams, Meet and uwClassrooms. You will find it on our comparison page.