The fine print

Who writes this

MidTable is written by a small editorial desk, published under the collective byline "the MidTable desk." We don't invent authors. There is no photogenic Head of Audio Research with a fabricated CV at the top of these pages, because there isn't one, and putting one there would be the first lie on a site whose entire proposition is that we'll tell you when something won't work.

The perspective is a real one: the person mid-table who notices the echo forming before the remote folks have to say anything, and who ends up as their organisation's unofficial audio marshal without ever being given the job. That's the reader, and it's the writer.

How we check things

Our rules, in order of how often they bind:

• Vendor claims come from vendor documentation, and carry a date. When we tell you that a Zoom Room's Noise Suppression control offers Off, Auto and High, or that Microsoft hands echo cancellation to a certified DSP when one is connected, we've read it on the vendor's own documentation and we print the date we read it. Every page with a fragile fact on it ends with a verification note naming what was checked and when.
• Dated facts are perishable, and we say so. Prices, plan names, version requirements and feature availability move. The dates aren't decoration — they're an expiry warning. If you're reading a long time after the date at the top, check the vendor before acting on anything numeric.
• Where a vendor's own sources disagree, we hedge visibly. The live example is a certain free plan that's still described in help-centre documentation but no longer advertised on the pricing page. We describe it exactly that way rather than picking whichever version reads better, and we'd rather look uncertain than be confidently wrong.
• Our reasoning is labelled as ours. The anchor rule, the Join Map, the sixty-second check and the room-type judgements are editorial opinion built on ordinary audio principles. They're not vendor guidance and we never dress them up as such.

Three things we don't do

1. We don't review or recommend hardware. Not microphones, not speakerphones, not headsets, not room kits. We'll explain why room acoustics or microphone placement matters, because you can't reason about a room without it — but the moment the answer becomes "buy this device," we stop and tell you that you've reached the edge of what we cover. Purchasing advice is a genuine discipline and we're not doing a bad imitation of it for commission.
2. We don't publish scores, benchmarks or test results. We have no measurement lab, no anechoic chamber and no test bench, so we have no numbers — and inventing them is the most common dishonesty in this category. Nothing on this site is ranked, rated or graded. Where we describe what software does, we're reporting the vendor's documented claims, attributed, plus our own reasoning about which room configurations those claims are relevant to.
3. We don't cover personal desktop meeting apps. MidTable is the room-system layer: shared rooms, room software, join layouts and the settings a person responsible for a room can reach. How to configure the meeting app on your own laptop at your own desk is a different topic, well covered elsewhere, and deliberately out of scope here. The only desktop behaviours we lean on are the ones that defend a room — proximity detection and second-device silencing.

How the money works

MidTable is reader-supported through affiliate links, and we'd rather over-explain that than have you find out sideways.

• What's an affiliate link here. Links to Krisp route through /go/krisp/ and carry rel="sponsored nofollow". If you click one and later subscribe, we earn a commission. You pay exactly the same price you'd pay going direct — there's no markup and no worse deal for using our link.
• Where they appear. Inside the "Action item" boxes, each with a disclosure printed in the box itself rather than buried on this page. If a link isn't in one of those boxes and isn't marked, it isn't paying us.
• What it doesn't buy. No vendor has reviewed, approved, commissioned or seen any page on this site before publication. Nobody has paid for placement, and we don't accept sponsored posts or guest articles. The most commercially inconvenient section on the site — the "rooms it doesn't help" list on our Krisp for conference rooms page — exists precisely because that has to be true to be worth anything.
• The independence commitment. Every page here recommends at least one thing that pays us nothing, and on most pages the free options come first: the anchor rule, Zoom's ultrasonic proximity detection, Teams' Audio off join option, seating, chairing habits, and the sixty-second room check. If those fix your room, you should not buy anything, and we will keep saying so.

Trademarks and independence

Zoom, Zoom Rooms, Microsoft, Microsoft Teams, Teams Rooms and Krisp are trademarks of their respective owners. MidTable is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking for any of them. We name their products because you can't write usefully about meeting-room audio without naming them, and we quote their documentation because it's the most reliable source available about their own software.

Analytics, privacy and your data

This site is static HTML. There are no accounts, no comment system, no newsletter, and no forms — so there's nothing here for you to submit and nothing of yours for us to store. We don't sell data, because we don't collect any that could be sold.

We use a standard privacy-respecting analytics measurement to count page visits in aggregate — how many people read the echo page, essentially, so we know what to write next. Affiliate links, by their nature, tell the vendor you arrived from us; that's how the commission is attributed, and it's the one place where a click is associated with this site. Your browser's own settings and any blocker you run are respected; nothing on this site tries to work around them, and every page works fully with JavaScript disabled.

When we're wrong

We will be, particularly about anything with a number in it, because vendors change settings menus and pricing pages without telling editorial sites. When it happens:

• Write to the desk at desk [at] midtable [dot] io with the page and the correction. Vendor documentation links are the fastest way to get something changed.
• We fix errors in place and move the "Updated" date in the byline. Where a correction changes advice rather than a detail, we say what changed and why, rather than quietly editing it out from under you.
• We don't take deletion requests from vendors about accurate, sourced criticism, and we don't add links in exchange for anything.

Use at your own discretion

Everything here is general guidance about meeting software and room configuration, offered in good faith and without warranty. We don't know your room, your organisation's policies or your device estate. Changing settings on shared corporate equipment is your call and your organisation's — if the room you're standing in is managed by an IT or AV team, talk to them before changing what they've configured. Nothing here is legal, procurement or compliance advice, and recording meetings in particular carries consent obligations that vary by jurisdiction and are entirely outside our lane.

That's the fine print. The rest of the site is more useful: start at conference room echo if something is echoing right now, hybrid meeting audio if you want the whole map, or A.O.B. if you just like reading about meetings going wrong.