Ever recorded a college lecture and found the audio crystal clear, only to have your concert footage from that very day come out sounding like trash? This happened to me, and after some digging, I found the specific setting to blame—and why you shouldn’t actually deactivate it completely.

I brought my Pixel 10 to a local band concert last weekend. The camera gets constant praise, and I wanted to see if it lived up to the hype. Throughout the set, I zoomed in and out to capture different moments—focusing on the guitarist during solos, pulling back for the full stage—basically trying to make the footage feel more intentional and dynamic.

Credit: Dibakar Ghosh | How-To Geek

The video quality was incredible. At 20x zoom, I could see fingers moving across the fretboard and clear facial expressions. The camera absolutely lives up to the hype. However, the audio sounded terrible and ended up completely ruining an otherwise incredible recording.

It sounded extremely muffled and compressed, like someone shoved the microphone underwater. But here’s where it gets interesting: every time I zoomed out, the sound got better and more natural. It was only when I zoomed in on the singer or the guitarist that the audio quality started to deteriorate. After putting two and two together, I was able to pinpoint the issue to a feature buried in the camera settings: Audio Zoom.

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So, what is audio zooming?

Based on the name alone, I figured the feature must be focusing on whatever I’m zooming into—enhancing the sound coming from the subject while suppressing everything around it. That would explain why my concert footage sounded so bad—because the actual audio was coming from all the surrounding speakers and not actually from the singer or guitarist I was zooming into.

To test this theory, I set up my iPad at one end of my room playing music, walked to the other end with my Pixel 10, and recorded a video while zooming in with audio zoom enabled. This time, the iPad was the only audio source—no ambient noise, no competing sounds. And the audio still came out muffled as I zoomed in all the way.

That didn’t make sense! If audio zoom was supposed to focus on sound coming from my subject, and the subject was the only thing making noise, why did it sound worse? I had to dig into what this feature actually does.

Turns out, audio zooming isn’t about enhancing the sound—it’s about reducing the noise

After doing a fair bit of research, I learned that audio zooming uses a technique called beamforming. If you have a multi-microphone setup—which most modern smartphones do—the mic that’s closer to a source of sound picks it up slightly earlier than the other mics. Beamforming uses this timing delay to determine where the sounds are coming from. It can then focus on sound coming from the front—where your camera is pointed—while reducing noise from everywhere else.

Now, for this to work well, the microphones need to be spaced far apart. The more distance between them, the easier it is to pinpoint sound direction. But smartphones are small and don’t have that luxury. So manufacturers add another layer of algorithms that prioritize human speech. They cut low-frequency rumble and emphasize mid-range frequencies where human voices naturally sit.

This means audio zoom isn’t enhancing the audio coming from a source or adding more quality. It’s not an additive feature, but a subtractive one designed to reduce noise. This is why I had a problem recording music, because the “noise” the feature is removing is actually the music I want to keep!

Should you just disable audio zooming?

If you’re at a concert, or anywhere you want to capture the full audio experience, yes—disable audio zoom. It’ll let your phone record sound as you’re hearing it from that position. That said, the feature isn’t useless!

Let’s say you’re recording a friend on a windy day and want to capture their voice while canceling out wind noise. Audio zoom can genuinely help there! Likewise, if you’re in a noisy classroom trying to record your professor’s lecture, but there’s a lot of ambient noise—students shuffling papers or construction work happening outside—audio zoom can cut through all of that and help you clearly capture what your professor is saying. It’s a useful feature, just not for every situation.

9/10

Brand

DJI

Pattern

Omnidirectional

Connector

USB-C

Weight

70g

On Google Pixel phones, this feature is called Audio Zoom. Samsung calls it Zoom-in Mic on the Galaxy S series. Your phone might use a different name depending on the manufacturer, but it should be somewhere in your camera settings.

If you do enable it for a specific situation, remember to turn it off afterward. If not, you might end up ruining footage that should’ve otherwise been great—just like I did at that concert.