You turn the volume to max, lean towards the screen, and your colleague still sounds like they are whispering from another room. If Zoom and Teams calls are too quiet on your Mac, the problem usually is not your ears - it is a stack of volume limits working against you.
Why call audio is so quiet on a Mac
Video calls run through more volume controls than almost anything else you do on a Mac, and the quietest one in the chain wins. On a typical call your sound passes through the speaker on the other person's device, the app's own output level, the meeting's playback setting, and finally your macOS system volume. If any single link is low, everything sounds faint.
- The other person's microphone or room - a laptop mic two feet away, no headset, or a soft-spoken voice all arrive quiet before they ever reach you.
- The app's playback level - Zoom and Teams each keep their own speaker volume that is separate from macOS.
- The macOS ceiling - even at 100%, a MacBook's small built-in speakers can be too quiet for speech, especially in a noisy room. We dug into this in why are my MacBook speakers so quiet.
Quick fixes to try first
Before reaching for any extra software, walk through the obvious controls - one of them is often turned down without you realising.
- Raise the in-app volume. In Zoom, open Settings > Audio and check the Output Level slider. In Teams, open Settings > Devices and confirm the speaker is set to the right output and turned up.
- Check the output device. Click the volume icon in the macOS menu bar and make sure audio is routing to the speakers or headphones you are actually using - not a forgotten Bluetooth device in another room.
- Ask the speaker to move closer to their mic or switch to a headset. A quiet source can rarely be fully rescued at your end.
- Turn off "automatically adjust microphone" on the other side if their level keeps dropping mid-sentence.
If you have done all of this and voices are still too faint, you have hit the real wall: the macOS maximum itself is too low for your room.
When macOS maxed out is still not loud enough
This is the gap most people run into on calls. The system volume is at 100%, the app is at full, and it is still not enough. The only fix is to push system audio past the OS ceiling - which macOS will not let you do on its own.
Vlume raises your Mac's system volume up to 800% (8x) past the normal maximum, so a quiet caller becomes clearly audible. Because it boosts everything coming out of your Mac, it works the same in Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Slack huddles, or any other app - there is nothing to configure per meeting.
The catch with cranking volume that high is usually distortion, so Vlume runs an always-on limiter that keeps loud peaks clean instead of letting them clip into a harsh, crackly mess. Its 6-band equaliser also lets you lift the mid frequencies where speech lives, which makes mumbled dialogue noticeably easier to follow.
It is built on Apple's modern Core Audio process-tap API, so there is no kernel driver, no restart, and no admin password - it just works on macOS 14.4 and later. Free open-source tools such as eqMac can also boost beyond 100%, but they install a system-level audio driver (which needs your admin password) and have no limiter, so heavy boosting tends to distort. Vlume trades that for a one-time price of £39 for 1-2 Macs (or £59 Family for up to five), with no subscription.
If you would rather not boost at all, even just nudging the equaliser towards speech can help - see how to equalise system audio on Mac for that approach. But for calls where people are simply too quiet, more clean headroom is what finally makes them audible.
Tired of squinting at the volume bar mid-meeting? Try Vlume free for 3 days - no card required - and hear your next call properly.