Business Lab · 2026-01-26 · 38 min
In an era where business, education, and even casual conversations occur via screens, sound has become a differentiating factor. We obsess over lighting, camera angles, and virtual backgrounds, but how we sound can be just as critical to credibility, trust, and connection. That’s the insight driving Erik Vaveris, vice president of product management and chief marketing officer at Shure, and Brian Scholl, director of the Perception & Cognition Laboratory at Yale University. Both see audio as more than a technical layer: It’s a human factor shaping how people perceive intelligence, trustworthiness, and authority in virtual settings. "If you're willing to take a little bit of time with your audio set up, you can really get across the full power of your message and the full power of who you are to your peers, to your employees, your boss, your suppliers, and of course, your customers," says Vaveris. Scholl’s research shows that poor audio quality can make a speaker seem less persuasive, less hireable, and even less credible. "We know that [poor] sound doesn't reflect the people themselves, but we really just can't stop ourselves from having those impressions," says Scholl.
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