Quantified Distortion Unit. It's a telco measure of voice signal quality, from the 64kbps and before days. 1QDU was the maximum tolerated impact on a voice call, and was the goal for line card compression to try and mux voice calls together.
It's not just zoom. All digital av processing ads delay. Some removes av sync. Decoherence of visual lip sync and sound interferes with any perceptual clues you get looking at people and beyond 50ms we start to detect it.
In head bone conducted audio along with your own ear hears things as you say them. So your own speech is instantaneous unless you incur some DSP delay somehow wearing headphones and it then collides with bone conducted sound. Now in any teleconference system you have a visual of apparently local people and an actual of 200+ms of delay, loss of sync, and a confusing outcome.
I do hate zoom. I hate all of it. I also know it's the way of the future.
They learn to cope. They use jargon, and clearly signal end -over and they demand ack, and repeat-back.
tactical radio does probably do some lightweight stuff which works in the RF field they have. If its through LEO, or any kind of centrex, its got delay.
> and my own in-head foldback PA
What is this?
I think you're saying you don't like Zoom, and I'm with you on that.