The audio zoom feature in your phone is ruining your videos, here's why

Your camera app most probably has an “audio Zoom” feature that is on by default and always messes with the sound in your videos. You should turn it off or at the very least be aware of it.

A brief history of audio zoom

The feature is not new — it’s actually more than a decade old. First seen on the Nokia 808 PureView (2012), but poorly marketed as Rich Recording, whatever that means, it was buried beneath talk about lossless digital zoom and microphones capable of handling high-amplitude recording.

Then we have LG. Ironically, the company was ahead of its time in many things, like ultra-wide cameras and secondary displays, yet its smartphone arm sadly fell under. Anyway, the LG G2 in 2013 finally came out with proper branding for the feature — audio Zoom.

What is audio zoom?

When you pinch-in (or use a slider) while recording video, your phone tries to “focus” or beam-form its audio recording to that point as well. In most cases, this is actually hurting your memorabilia.

Modern smartphones don’t have just the one microphone — they have at least three. One is typically near the camera lenses, one on the top, and one on the bottom. When you are in a voice call, the two extra microphones are used to pick up external noises, invert their phases, and cancel them out.

The microphone array on a Pixel phone | Image by PhoneArena

The same tech is applied to audio Zoom. When you zoom in, the phone “fakes” an “audio focus” by amplifying the gain of the microphones. Then, it uses the audio information from the side microphones to know which frequencies to phase-invert and cancel in the final product.

When does audio zoom potentially ruin your clips?

When you are trying to record an on-stage performance, when you zoom in on the artist (or your kid) keep in mind that their voice is going through a PA system that has speakers off to the side. This essentially means that you are telling your phone to cancel the audio that’s coming from the speakers — deleting massive chunks of frequencies that you actually want to record.

Even the iPhone Camera Control menu doesn't show it | Image by PhoneArena

If you are trying to record a sports event, the whole excitement, the crowd roaring, cheering, and booing, that massive ambiance of exhilaration and passion will get narrowed down and canceled when you zoom in on your favorite athlete running across the field. And what audio is the phone supposed to be amplifying here? Their shoes digging through the grass?

Why is a