I've noticed in Zoom meetings on my MacBook, I'm always too loud for other participants. Of course I've gone into Zoom's audio settings and manually reduced the input volume and made sure "Automatically adjust microphone volume" is off. The mic seems to adapt its gain to counter whatever I set the input volume to in Zoom.
I have also tried going into the MacBook's Sound Settings and manually changed the input volume. The input level meter peaks at the same place no matter what input volume is set to.
I've tried going into the AirPods' settings, but nothing there is able to adjust the mic sensitivity/gain. (Personalized Volume and Adaptive Audio are for speaker output, not mic input.)
I hypothesize this is just a "feature" of the AirPods--that they adjust the mic gain to a uniform level (probably peaking at 0 or -3 dB), and thus Zoom's settings are irrelevant.
Does anyone have any thoughts or info on this?